Forgiveness, love, and connection between you and other human beings is where it’s at. I know that’s not always easy, but that is your job. Work it out. Work out how to be that kind of human being. That doesn’t make you a doormat either.
We’ve all done things in our lives that just don’t work, things that have eventually worked against us; I’m not judging you for what you might have done in the past either. I’m calling you out on who you have been turning yourself into before it’s too late. Wake up.
WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
I’ll let you in on something.
The subconscious conclusion I made about people is that “people don’t care.” As in, the people around me (and people in general) really don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. And sure, this may be somewhat true for a lot of people, but not to the level I’ve elevated it in my subconscious.
It’s automatic for me now. This is my social conclusion, the second of my three saboteurs. It’s what immediately comes up in my moments of pressure or duress or conflict. It’s sometimes ugly and greasy and in complete contrast to my commitment to people. It’s the constant invisible wall between me and others.
It also colors my approach to many aspects of my life in a very singular way. From driving, to going to the mall, to watching TV, all of it. Again, I’m not walking around the mall like a raging lunatic, but just because the flag isn’t flying, it doesn’t mean there’s no danger lurking.
I’ll give you an example.
Not too long ago, my wife and I ordered a sofa. It was a pretty big sofa. And when I had it delivered, the movers decided it’d be a good idea to drop it off right at the end of my driveway. Great, right? Apparently, as my wife likes to remind me to this day, I didn’t check the right box when we ordered it. So, there’s this giant fucking sofa wrapped in plastic sitting sixty feet from my front door like the rotting carcass of a once-frozen mammoth uncovered in the middle of some distant tundra.
While some people might have asked for help, in my mind “people don’t care,” so therefore knocking on the neighbors’ door and asking for a hand simply wasn’t an option. It didn’t even occur to me that I should or even could do that. It just wasn’t on my radar! There was no process of should I or shouldn’t I; it was automatic and instant. I mean, no one gives a fuck about me and what I have to deal with, right? God forbid they might say no or get annoyed or bothered by my intrusion.
I wasn’t methodically going through this internal mental processing at the time. I’m now conditioned to live this way. It happened in seconds, and in the moment I did what I would always do.
I did it myself.
I wrestled that giant turd up the driveway, through a door opening clearly designed for prepubescent Hobbits shuffling in single file, then through two child gates that would put Israeli airport security to shame, and through another doorway custom-built for an eight-foot walking pencil. Finally, I bundled it arse-over-elbow into the desired room like one of those Fast and the Furious stunt cars spinning into a parking space facing the wrong direction at eighty-seven miles per hour.
Like I said, this was a big sofa, but with a smattering of low-frequency grunts, a lathering of elbow grease, MacGyver-style imagination, and nuclear-ground bursts of profanity, I managed to eventually do it.
My wife stood there, hands on hips, with that “You’re an idiot” loving glare that she has come to master over many years of witnessing my special kind of madness.
This is the kind of shit your saboteurs drive you to. They shape how you participate in life. Of course, some of you are probably thinking I’m insane—while there are others who are sitting there reading this, nodding their head and wondering what the problem is here.
You know exactly where I’m coming from.
At a really fundamental level, this makes complete sense to the way that I see life. I’m independent. Sometimes catastrophically so. In an I-don’t-really-need-people kinda way. On one hand, that independence works for me. As an author, I need to be self-generative and can generate a steady perseverance without outside influence or coaxing.
Then there’s the ways that it works against me (particularly when furniture is involved), like how easy it could be for me to do this life alone and the impact choosing independence would have on my marriage or my kids. It’s not vindictive—I mean, I love people—but in my mind, I just don’t need them.
Those who are slavishly independent will testify to the ravenous appetite for that singular way of living. Many of you have had a trail of broken relationships, of being constantly unsettled and striving to feed that beast. Then there’s the loneliness . . . the cold, unforgiving disconnect of loneliness.
Independence has become the answer, but not always to the question that is being asked.
THE ROOT OF HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT PEOPLE
I’ve talked about the necessity of uncovering the conclusions we made about ourselves, and it’s equally as important to do the same for the one you made about other people.
But if this is buried deep in your subconscious, how exactly do you do that? Let’s get personal and spend the next few pages figuring out what your hidden conclusion about others is.
Start with thinking about the times when you make conscious excuses for your unconscious thought processes. Those excuses are another hint toward your conclusion. Try to be aware of when you make those excuses and catch yourself doing it. But I’m not talking about legitimate excuses for legitimate problems. I’m talking about when parties, nights out, and dinner with “friends” feels like the equivalent of sunlight to a vampire. Or when someone proposes a business idea and you immediately think of all the ways they will try to fuck you over.
Perhaps you have a particular label that you assign to people with certain qualities, traits, or talents that you automatically avoid. Your conclusion might well be right underneath that little thing that irks you so much. Are they too smart? Does that make them arrogant or dominating to you? Do you avoid those people? What does that say about them?
Are they too “polished” or “together” in a way that makes them seem selfish? Perhaps they’re too outgoing, which points to their aggression or insensitivity?
What is the common denominator, the all-pervasive conclusion, that allows you to predict and make sense of people?
Set aside your usual BS, scratch at the surface of your thoughts, tell yourself the truth. What are you really trying to avoid about people? People are what?
This second saboteur, your conclusion about others, could be anything: People are . . .
•stupid
•untrustworthy
•a threat
•unreliable
•uncaring
•selfish
•cruel
•manipulative
•untrustworthy
Which one captures your baseline experience of people? It might be none of the above, but these are just some samples of what it could be for you. The real question is, what’s yours?
Keep in mind, the nature of this conclusion, like all of the three saboteurs, is that of a criticism. In this case, your grievance with other people.
Don’t move on until you find the phrase that resonates with you, the one that truly captures your experience of people—all people.
You know the drill. Get a pencil or pen and fill in the blank.
SOCIAL CONCLUSION—“PEOPLE ARE _______________________.”
Remember, this isn’t just an opinion of people. This is what you have fundamentally concluded about human beings. Once you’ve filled in this blank, keep in mind that first saboteur, your personal conclusion. We’re building a picture, and we’re almost there.
It’s time to move on to the final saboteur, the conclusion you’ve made about life itself. We all have a certain angle on life; it appeals to each of us in a very fundamental yet personal way. Sure, we’ve all heard people say things like “Life is an adventure” or “Life is amazing,” but what if we were to dig a little d
eeper? What’s down there, trapped in the magic little sponge, defining how we feel about life?
Buckle up. This one is a doozy, folks.
10
Life
We rewrite our dreams or stuff them away in the darkness to avoid having them shattered. We keep them tucked away. For hope. For later. Maybe. We trade them in for a life less lived.
Got your conclusion about yourself? Check. Your conclusion about other people? Check. Then it’s time to move on to our final saboteur, which many people feel is often the heaviest of them all.
This is the conclusion you’ve made about life itself. How do you feel about life?
I don’t mean just your life. Life. The whole thing, all of it. What stirs for you when you take a look at where you’re at, including all of the family and relationship stuff, what’s going on with your work, your neighborhood, your town. Take it out even further to social issues and political concerns you have, the problems and tragedies currently facing the country and the world.
This life thing is massive and complex and unpredictable and at times completely overwhelming.
It’s no wonder we are becoming more and more addicted to positive attitudes or freeing ourselves from our earthly pursuits in favor of something a little more experiential. A little longer lasting. A bypass for the strains of daily life.
If you follow me online, you already are aware of my aversion to positivity. It’s like a fucking disease spreading through society like wildfire. I mean, I have nothing against being positive per se, but the addiction to it crushes everyone else who isn’t quite so effortlessly sprinkled with the magic yay-dust. It can be a bit too much at times to be told to keep your chin up when your relationship to yourself is so dire! I’ve also met far too many positivity-heads who became so encumbered by their sugary goodness that they ignored or lived in complete denial of the gravity of their situation. Until it was much too late.
Heck, if we really believed that life was wonderful and absolutely filled with possibility, we wouldn’t have to say it. We wouldn’t need reminders or memes on social media to keep us in check. It would be like gravity, just there all the time, so much so that, like gravity, we wouldn’t even notice it. And it’s not. So, what is there instead?
But we almost have to tell ourselves the upbeat, positive story that life is this way or that to distract us from what we really believe to be true.
Deep down in your subconscious, there resides a life conclusion:
“Life is hard.”
“Life is complicated.”
“Life is a struggle.”
“Life is too much.”
Like the rest of your conclusions, it’s never good news!
In fact, while what you think about yourself and others might upset you, what you think about life is what really puts the lid on everything.
“Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A LIFE WITH CONSEQUENCE
Without your even realizing it, your conclusion about life shapes and influences the everyday paths you take and burdens you to live with the consequence.
If you’ve concluded that “life is a struggle,” you’re going to work hard to overcome that struggle with all the positivity or hard work or logical thinking that you can muster, but you’ll inadvertently be making sure it stays one too. You’ll pass up or write off opportunities and openings for change that seem too easy or too complex, or you’ll sabotage yourself when you’re seemingly winning.
Right back into the struggle you’ll tumble.
How many times have you thought, “If I could just stop eating this” or “If I could just stop spending money on that,” but you keep doing it anyway?
Rather than avoid the struggle, you literally keep yourself in it. You make the same mistakes again and again, hit the same pitfalls over and over.
Many of our problems in life could be solved fairly simply, but we somehow can’t, don’t, or won’t deal with them. You need to look past the litany of ready-to-hand explanations here.
It’s what you have concluded about life that has you stuck in a certain place.
You might be someone who is driven by the conclusion “Life is hard.” From the outside, you’re doing great! You have a dream job or business or family. But you’re aware of something else, something that pulls you down most days. But still you work hard at it, you persevere, and you have your victories here and there.
But those great circumstances are fleeting. It eventually always ends up “hard,” doesn’t it? Too many emails, too many meetings, too many complaints from your partner or kids or parents or friends. Not enough time or money or knowledge or whatever.
What you’re dealing with internally often doesn’t match up to what is going on externally.
Even though this life you have built was supposed to be the answer to the life you used to have.
On the other hand, your life might have very little by way of positive circumstances in it. You might really feel as if you’re on the bottom, and even your hard-earned shots at success in the past eventually turned in that predictable direction.
Listen, you might be living your life on the thinnest of edges, existing each moment no more than a hair’s breadth away from crying or getting angry or collapsing into hopelessness, day after day after day. You can’t talk to anyone about it because you’ve built a facade of keeping your shit together, you believe no one can help you, and you’ve finally succumbed to the daily one-more-drink answer to pull yourself back from the brink of yet another fall into the valley of your hapless, hopeless misery.
You’re on the run, but you can’t run anymore. You’re out of breath, out of ideas, and the walls are closing in on you. As we learned in the previous chapters, we are so uncontrollably driven for our conclusions to be vindicated. We need them to resonate and provide some solid foundation to an otherwise willowy, uncertain existence, but when is this fucking madness going to end?
You don’t have problems! You have your problems! The perfect issues, specific to you, that allow you to continue with this daily absurdity. And that’s what it is. Absurd. Your whole fucking life is absurd now.
All because you’ve told yourself that life can’t be any different from what you have come to believe.
SNATCHING DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY
You might have read a book or listened to a seminar and thought, “Aha! I can finally make sense of myself.” You got hold of something about yourself that resonated and made a difference at the time. But does it really get to the heart of you and why you are the way you are? Probably not.
That’s more than likely because you’re always stuck with that conclusion you’ve made about life.
You might consciously think you’re sorted out, but those subconscious conclusions have different plans. And eventually, they prevail. Every time.
When you do experience a victory, it’s a victory against your conclusions. When you get a promotion at work or build a successful business, that’s not a victory in your career or your finances—it’s a victory against what you’ve subconsciously determined about how “life is a struggle” or “life is unfair.” You feel good! Your future looks brighter, and your current life is syncing up nicely with it. Then shit happens and down you go. Back your conclusion comes. “See? Life really is unfair, or else I wouldn’t have gotten fired. When am I ever going to catch a break?”
In fact, when you strategize to make something good happen in your life, you’re doing that precisely because of your conclusions. If you didn’t fundamentally believe “life is hard,” you wouldn’t need to do what you do to make your life work. You could just sit on the couch all day watching TV or your plants grow
or your favorite undies splashing around in the washing machine like they’re on vacation.
“Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.”
—C. G. Jung
Have you ever felt like you’re so close to success that you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, only to have that success slip between your fingers? What if that was supposed to go that way because that particular success would have been a threat to what you have fundamentally concluded?
The moment before you cross the finish line, you fall. Or you stop running. Or you get absorbed in something else, something shinier or better or bigger. The dark arts of distraction take over.
Right at the brink of success, there’s this nagging dialogue in our subconscious saying, “Wait, this isn’t right. Life is a struggle, it can’t be this easy, there has to be something else.” And we stumble and fall. Or sabotage.
We ask ourselves, “Is this it? I can’t be fulfilled, because life is unfulfilling.” Or unfair or dangerous or a disappointment. Whatever your fundamental “life is” might be.
There’s a glass ceiling that you can’t see, that sends you right back down to earth the moment you try to surpass it. And when you bump your head on that ceiling and your ass hits the floor, you’ve once again proven your conclusion about life.
You can improve yourself, get smarter and stronger and more secure, but you can never get past that conclusion. The experiences of improvement and success are fleeting.
Of course, there are the people on the other end of the spectrum. We saw that a certain type of person tries to overcome their conclusion that “life is hard” by working extra hard to outrun it. But there are other people with the same conclusion who respond by giving in to it. Hey, maybe living in a tent in the middle of nowhere isn’t such a bad idea after all! Or they have conclusions that are so toxic, so limiting, that they don’t even try. It’s called “settling” for the life you have. It’s when you become worn down, shaped, and limited by your internal dialogue to the point of surrender.
Stop Doing That Sh*t Page 9