It’s All My Fault
How I Messed Up the World, and
Why I Need Your Help to Fix It
Jordan Phoenix
Jordan Phoenix
It’s All My Fault
Copyright © 2014 Jordan Phoenix
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 149924651X
ISBN 13: 9781499246513
www.uncommonsense.is
Dedication
This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever been talked out of pursuing what is in their heart, and needs a reason to believe again.
To anyone who has dealt with hardships that seemed unbearable, and didn’t know where to turn for help.
To anyone who has suffered great loss.
To anyone who feels like they’re alone in the universe.
To anyone who has ever broken down crying from seeing another human being dig through the trash, and feeling powerless to do something about it.
To anyone who cares about people who live outside of their borders.
To anyone who knows that they’re capable of moving mountains, but has trouble figuring out where to begin.
To anyone who has a vision so big that they’re scared to tell others, out of fear that they’ll be called crazy.
To anyone who wants to create a more free, equal, and awesome world for all of humanity.
To anyone ready to leave the status quo behind, and create a future of abundance in which everyone has their needs met.
About the Author
Jordan Phoenix is a social entrepreneur, speaker, author, and scalability consultant. He is the founder of Project Free World, an organization that facilitates the creation of collaborative social innovation projects in order to provide the proper food, rights, education, and environment to every person on the planet. He also writes a personal development blog called Uncommon Sense to examine the rapidly evolving landscape of life in the 21st century. Jordan’s work has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, The Times of India, The Huffington Post, Lifehack, MindBodyGreen, The New York Observer, The Social Journal, GOOD, and The Spark Documentary. He was recognized as a Quora Top Writer in 2013.
Note from the Author
The English language was first created over a millennium ago. The style and usage of a language reflects the dominant operational paradigms present in the minds of the population. As such, many of the rules that created the structure of this language reflect outdated paradigms; some of which I’d like to begin to undo with the creation of this book. You may notice that I have used plural terms such as “they” in place of “she” or “he” as often as possible. Note that this gender-neutral approach was used intentionally to shed light upon the fact that neither women nor men should be valued any less than the other.
This book represents a life philosophy and collection of ideas based upon my own knowledge, research, experiences and beliefs about life. This does not necessarily make any of it true or valid. I encourage you to not accept anything I say at face value. Examine it with your own mind, and accept the pieces that resonate and make sense to you. No one can ever be a better expert at making decisions in your own life than you can. There is no such thing as 100% pure objectivity or 100% independent research; we can only attempt to get as close as we can to it. All information and statistics are biased in one way or another, and my writings are not exempt from this. I highly recommend that you use the vast quantities of accessible public information available in this era to challenge everything and anything in this book in your own mind, and know that there are always exceptions and alternatives. There aren’t any rules that are truly set in stone, there are only guidelines.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – When it Almost Ended
Chapter 2 – Visions of Utopia
Chapter 3 – Why We’re Stuck
Chapter 4 – When Systems Go Bad
Chapter 5 – When Social Good Goes Bad
Chapter 6 – Why We’re Afraid to Change
Chapter 7 – Why It’s All My Fault
Chapter 8 – The Journey Begins with a Single Step
Chapter 9 – My Awakening Transformation
Chapter 10 – Crowdfunding for Cities
Chapter 11 – Ideas Worth Creating
Chapter 12 – How Helping Others Helps Ourselves
Chapter 13 – Moving Towards the Future
Chapter 14 – End Poverty or Die Trying
1
When it Almost Ended
“Jump.
You’re worthless. Jump. Just do it already.
It’s been in the back of your mind for months now. What’s stopping you? You do realize that your apartment is the closest one to the staircase, right? No one would even see you go.
You will never be successful. Your life has no meaning. No one cares about you. It should have been obvious that no one would help you, because you’re delusional. Why did you think you had what it takes to change the systems of the world? What makes you so special? You are a complete and utter failure. Everything you’ve ever believed in is wrong. The world is a cruel, cold, corrupt place, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Just like the many who have tried before you, you will never fix it.
Just look at your role models. Gandhi and MLK got shot in the head when they tried, and they were exceptionally great beings. You, on the other hand, are a nobody. You’ve wasted your time even trying, and you are now a laughing stock to your friends and everyone else who has ever had the displeasure of knowing you. You’re a walking joke.
Everyone else was smart to stay at their corporate jobs. They’re moving up the ladder now, they’re buying homes, they’re getting married and having kids and going on awesome vacations. They were realistic. They took their licks; they sucked it up and dealt with it. That’s life.
Now you’re in over your head in debt. You’ve been living off of credit cards, and now they’re maxed out. And let’s not even begin talking about your student loans. You can’t even go bankrupt and wipe the slate clean. You’re stuck. You will be a slave to this system forever. You’ll never get married. What type of woman would want a guy who can’t afford the dollar menu? You’re not a real man.
Your own family members don’t even want to speak to you, and you’re about to get evicted from this rundown Los Angeles apartment. You’ve been so busy working on your idealistic nonsense that you don’t even have any close friends in this city. You applied for that janitor position, and couldn’t even get an interview. You have a degree in civil engineering, and you got rejected by Starbucks. You walked around Rodeo Drive -- a place where a pair of shoes cost more than your monthly rent -- with a sign offering $1,000 to anyone who would help you find work, and still no one cared enough to want to help you. You snuck into Sony Pictures and put flyers on every windshield, and all you got in return was people cursing you out. The only offers you got were scams from people trying to take money that you don’t have.
Where will you live now? There’s nothing left for you. Are you going to keep trying to help the homeless now? Get ready, because you’re about to join the club. You’re actually hurting them now, because you’re going to take up extra resources that should have gone to other people who really need it. Actually, the other homeless people are better off than you are, because they’re not stuck with college loans. They still can change their lives with willpower. You’re trapped. You had all the potential in the world, and you blew it. You spit in the face of everything good that you ever had, and now it’s all gone. You
had a girlfriend, you had a six-figure career path, you had some nice things -- and you left it all -- for this? There’s no hope for you. Meditation doesn’t help anymore. Inspiring videos don’t help. It’s over.
Get out of bed right now. Walk up to the roof on the fifth floor. Then jump off. Put an end to this. Within sixty seconds, all of this can be over for good. No more suffering. No more waking up in the middle of the night from the horrible nightmares. No more having to think about all of this. Just jump.”
“Fine! I’ll do it. I said I will do it. Just shut up already! I can’t take this anymore.”
That was me answering the relentless negative voice in my head. Things had been spiraling downward for awhile, and I had finally hit rock bottom. I didn’t have health insurance or money to even begin to try to dig myself out of that hole with therapy if I wanted to, because my business had failed. Oh, how the irony would get to me. An aspiring personal development coach and speaker walks away from his lucrative job, moves thousands of miles away, tries to make a living doing something that truly helps people change their lives, and ends up becoming the opposite of motivational.
My clients had no idea that I would have to leave extra early for appointments, because my car decided to pick up a new hobby of shutting off on the highway. On numerous occasions, I had paid to have it fixed, but the problem continued, and now I was completely broke. This was my only hope of generating income. I needed the car to work. When it would shut off, I’d pull over to the side of the road. The police would show up and tell me that they were required to call a tow truck, and that if my car didn’t start within the 20 minutes before the truck arrived, I’d have to pay to get it towed. Luckily, most of the time it would start again within the 20 minutes; other times, it wouldn’t. A part of me couldn’t believe that circumstances like these really had become my life.
After I was finished with meetings, my energy level was so low that I would lay on the floor of my apartment, helpless. I would come back and just sit in the bathtub for hours, because I did not have the energy to do anything else. Never in my life did I feel more lost or more like a failure. I moved to Los Angeles -- the homeless capital of America -- with a mission of trying to end poverty, and instead ended up trapped in poverty myself. How was it possible that in Hollywood, California, where I lived, people could drive their Ferraris and Lamborghinis past dozens of people sleeping on the sidewalk? How could no one seem to care? I cared too much, and was overwhelmed with frustration about the fact that I was unable to significantly change things. I felt as if there was no place for me in the world.
The suffering had eventually become unbearable. It was so overpowering that I couldn’t take it any longer. Hardly anyone knew how bad of a mental state I was in, because I kept it to myself. I truly felt that I was hopeless, and that it would be a disservice to bring anyone down with me. Sleep became my only escape. I slept as often as I could to try and avoid reality. Being awake was too hard to do. The problem arose when being asleep became even worse than being awake. I began having terrible nightmares that involved some of the most horrific things anyone could ever imagine. In one dream, I sat in the back seat of my car tied up, while someone else put it in reverse and slammed on the gas; crashing into a house at full speed. In each dream, just at the point where I was about to die, I would wake up. It got to the point where it felt like there was no escape. Being awake was too stressful. Being asleep was no better, and often ended with a wild nightmare within a few short hours. I began to stay up for as long as I possibly could, to try to delay the violent nightmares that I knew were coming.
During this stretch of time, there was violence going on in the rundown neighborhood that I lived in. Two people got shot just a hundred feet away from my window. I heard the shots go off, and saw people scatter in all directions before police came and closed off the street. The next day, I posted flyers around the neighborhood offering free meditation classes at my apartment to try and help calm the area down a bit. This resulted in phone calls from people who believed it was a front for a prostitution ring. It really felt like I was living in a hell on earth.
On one fateful night, I decided that I couldn’t take it anymore. I gave in. After awakening from a nightmare in a cold sweat, I was laying down in my bed in the five-foot by nine-foot oversized closet that was bedroom. In the silence, negative thoughts fired out from my mind like gunshots through the pitch-dark space at such a rapid pace that it overwhelmed me and destroyed the last of my willpower. Like a persistent ocean wave eroding a heavy rock into dust, it had taken out all of the fight I had left in me. I had accepted my fate, and it was time to go up to the roof.
Just as I was preparing myself to go, a life-altering epiphany dawned upon me. In that moment of total surrender, feeling completely unafraid of death, I realized that for the first time in my life, I was completely free. I forfeited all of my hopes and dreams, my self-image, the story I had for my life, the external opinions, the bonds I’d made -- all of it. Something amazing happened to me in that moment that is tough to fully describe with words. I finally truly understood what Eckhart Tolle and Chuck Palahniuk had been talking about in their books. This was The Power of Now. This was Fight Club. I lost all hope, and I found freedom. I gained the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide. I will attempt to cut through the clichés, and explain this insight more thoroughly.
What I came to understand was that even though I had already accepted that I was going to die, I was still able to delay that decision indefinitely. I was playing with house money now. The conditions and circumstances of that moment became irrelevant, because it was extra time that I wasn’t supposed to have. Being alive meant that no matter how bleak things looked, I could always find new opportunities to create moments of happiness in some way for myself and others, and that was all that really mattered. There are an unlimited number of ways to do a random act of kindness for someone; and as long as we can do that, we will always have the ability to add joy to the world and find meaning in this existence.
Since I’m still alive, I thought: why not put together a plan -- in book form, perhaps -- explaining my vision for the world, and the practical measures we can collectively take to make life better for one another?
Several years have now passed since that moment. You just finished reading chapter one of that book.
2
Visions of Utopia
Let’s rewind a bit to several years earlier; when I was seventeen years old, and fresh out of high school. I was young, ambitious, and happy-go-lucky -- the world was my oyster. Like many others, going away to college represented a major step toward my independence. It was the first time that I would be away from my family for an extended period. This is where I began to discover that it was possible to start with a blank canvas; to press reset, and pick and choose the things we want for our own lives. It was time for me to make the rules now. Well, some of them, at least. I discovered that with the right planning and effort, life could become a lot more enjoyable than I ever imagined. But before we get into that, I’ll give you a little bit of background about what my childhood was like. In many ways, I’d been doing things differently without realizing it ever since I was in diapers.
Growing up, I never felt that I was a particularly popular kid at school. For most of my earlier years, I remember being very quiet and reserved. I stayed to myself a lot, and felt much more comfortable listening and observing than being the center of attention in most environments. Talking on the phone was never my thing, and I’d give one-word answers to every question. My friend’s mother once used a sponge as an analogy to describe me, because she said I would just sit calmly and soak up everything. Gossip was never really important to me. What really piqued my interest were ideas, as I was always very curious about learning and inventing things. I was fascinated by inventions and meteorology, and wanted to be an inventor when I grew up.
At twelve months old, I taught myself how to read item labels at the supermarket. W
hen I was at the grocery store, I’d tell people: “Seven-U-P!” At age four, I wanted to write a letter to Nintendo explaining my ideas for a Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers video game, to ask if they would please create it for me. My mother compiled my ideas into a note, and sent it to them. They thanked me for my ideas, and said that a Chip ‘n’ Dale game was actually already in the works. Capcom ended up producing the game, which went on to sell over one million copies worldwide.
When I was eight, my mother pulled me out of the school I was in, because it was too easy for me. The teacher was upset when I left, because he told my mother that I was helping him teach the class and explaining concepts to some of the students. At age twelve, I created a method for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius that was faster and easier than the formula we were given in the textbook. When word got around the class about it, and I was able to complete the problems faster than the teacher, he said: “Your way works better than mine. I should start teaching your method instead.”
Learning and getting good grades often came very naturally to me. Though one time in middle school, I failed my Italian test on purpose, because I wanted people to think I was cool and badass. I also used to pretend to forget things sometimes; because I had a really good memory, and was scared that people would think I was weird for being able to remember everything.
Looking back, how bizarre is it that the values I picked up through school and the culture around me taught me that pretending not to be smart would make people like me more? Thank goodness the women I interacted with started thinking intelligence was sexy somewhere along the line. Anyway, let’s not get too carried away now, and stop that train before this turns into fifty shades of J. That’s material for a different book.
Outside of class, I was very into playing football and basketball. Even though my left hand dribble flat out sucked, I would make up for it by always hustling on defense and fighting for rebounds. I treated every play like it was the 4th quarter of Game 7 of the NBA Finals. A friend of mine said that I was by far the most annoying person to get covered by in football or basketball, because I would never quit. Since many of the kids who we played with were several years older than me, I took that as a compliment.
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