Being normal will get you nowhere. Stay weard.
What if I told you, that we are all living a story that was created by people since the beginning of time. This story was passed on from generation to generation, from our distant relatives to our grandparents, from our grandparents to our parents, and from our parents to us. And everything we think we know is just a story created by the human mind.
We are a living organism on this small rock in space, among trillions of other rocks. We live our lives searching for happiness and fulfillment, and we do our best to love, and to be loved, to be needed, and to have a purpose. We tend to forget that we are all important, we are all individuals yet we are connected into one. We are one race, one planet, one universe, existing together at this moment we call life, and only this moment is where everything happens. Past is not relevant; Future is not here yet. We just live in the now and that’s all we have and that’s everything we will ever have.
We created a language that revolutionized the way we communicate making it easier for us to express our emotions, share our thoughts and ideas. A language may be one of the oldest and most complex creations of humankind, which helped us achieve such rapid technological progress. Language helped record our history and pass it on to future generations allowing us to combine multiple lifetimes worth of knowledge into the intellectual platform that we have today. There are numerous benefits of having a language but the most powerful one, in my opinion, is the ability to influence and persuade people. The power lies in the hands of those who tell stories. The right kind of story can reach millions, change a country, and bring people together. On the contrary, a story can create enemies, start wars and destroy people’s lives.
We’ve used stories to pass down knowledge and wisdom to our offspring for thousands of years. Some stories taught us incredible lessons and empowered us, but some spun out of control and created a social mindset, made up of beliefs, traditions, standards, regulations and social expectations which we try to live up to every single day of our lives. We keep passing this social mindset from generation to generation. It inhabits our minds at a very early stage of our lives and tells us what we should or shouldn’t do. What things we should like and how we should behave. It judges, compares, and most importantly prevents us from being ourselves by telling us what is acceptable and what isn’t. We have been given roles to play, and that’s what most of us do. We become actors playing our characters in this story of humanity.
Our roles become habits that we unconsciously play out every day of our life. Our highly intelligent society; so powerful, yet seem to be stuck in its own creation. Stories that made us so great have trapped us, divided us into countries, races, genders, and classes, creating an artificial world with artificial problems. We advanced technologically but in the process lost our connection to Nature, Earth and the Universe causing a mind-body misbalance that manifests itself in a form of stress, diseases and all kinds of addictive and excessive behaviors.
A good example of this misbalance is our overconsumption. It’s not a secret that people have always been fascinated with stuff. Today however our obsession with things is on a whole other level! We all share this planet and we are all just visitors here. We won’t be able to take anything with us when we are gone. Yet all our lives we accumulate things. What’s the point? Why do we give so much meaning to stuff? We are not born obsessing over things. We developed this characteristic over time because of the stories that we are told by the society in which we are brought up.
Our whole economy depends on us spending money on products and services. This kind of system thrives on maximizing profits by coming up with stories that are specifically designed to make us want more. Companies don’t tell us these stories because they are evil, but because they are run by people just like us, who have the same instinctive belief that more is better. Their goal is to maximize their profits and they do it by selling us a story. From a very young age, various marketing techniques have gradually conditioned us to rely on external things by teaching us to associate happiness and success with material possessions and social status. After being exposed to hundreds and thousands of advertisements day after day for many years we form consumer habits. These habits promote a need for more, making us feel incomplete. We get emotionally attached to material possessions giving them more power over us.
This western mentality has created a falls illusion that happiness is a destination. That it only comes in a form of wealth or some other future event, like finding “the one”, or getting a dream job that will make us free and eternally happy. We have been programmed to create lack. So we end up living most of our lives in lack, searching for the next best thing, always looking forward and missing out on the only thing that is real. This priceless moment that life gives us now. Happiness is not a destination it is a skill. It’s just there all the time, waiting to be accepted. Happiness is a choice that we have to learn how to make. But it’s not an easy thing to do given that all our lives we’ve been taught the opposite.
Our human collective mindset is stuck in the past and changes much slower than our technological progress which allowed us to move foreword so quickly. Our brains are still the same as they were thousands of years ago. So this hunger for more comes out of our old mindset that’s been around for way too long. This hunger for more provokes lawsuits and wars and creates inequality. Some people have billions, and some have nothing. But what if we could change that. How can we divide something that is not ours in the first place? How can we pass it on from family to family, from generation to generation and claim that it belongs to us? We spend so much time on bureaucracy and deciding what’s yours and what’s mine that we forget what life is all about. Just because everybody lives this way doesn’t mean it is the right way. And just because we don’t have a solution at this moment doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
We are smart enough to understand that we are outperforming nature (in a way) with our technological progress and because of that we need to change ourselves. Sometimes you just have to admit that the plan isn’t working anymore and you have to start from scratch. We have to change ourselves and stop feeding this hunger for more. We need to realize that that’s not the way to success. We are explorers who love to learn new things and conquer the unknown and that is the drive for our progress. Our hunger for more actually slows down our progress in a form of inequality, wars and violent dictatorships which are always in the interest of the few in power, and never benefit the majority. Look at the history of all wars. They never resulted in anything good. Why are we still having them?
In fact, it wasn’t hunger for more that helped us discover electricity, invent telecommunications or airplanes, it was the excitement to learn about the world we live in, and a desire to make our planet a better place. All those discoveries and inventions that contributed to our technological progress were made by people who genuinely wanted to learn, grow, and bring value to others. The greatest scientist and inventors were excited to do what they do. They were the ones who stopped listening to what the collective mindset told them and focused on creating their own future. Most of them were considered insane and yet they contributed to our growth more than anyone else. They questioned everything and didn’t take no for an answer. Even when everyone told them that it was impossible, they proved everyone wrong. There is a famous quote that states: “Only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do”. The only thing is that those who change the world are not the crazy ones. They are the ones who stopped listening to the crazy mindset which we all live by. We are all running a seriously outdated program. Let’s upgrade our software and change the world inside our heads before trying to change something on the outside.
Ask yourself is it really impossible to create a world that you want, or is it just a story that you’ve been told over and over again: “This is how things work and there is no other way. It’s human nature”. It sounds like an excuse.
Human Nature is amazing, it is empowering and it is limitless. For as long as we listen to our collective mindset that was created to benefit a few, to keep people in control, and to prevent them from asking questions, we will be limited to the story it is telling us.
I encourage you to challenge your norms and think about how storiees you grew up with shaped your mindset. I encourage you to question things, and to live life as you desire and not as society tells you. Try not to put down or hurt others. Compete with yourself only and don’t fall into our collective mind trap. Our human mindset is made up of stories and beliefs, that’s all there is — stories and beliefs, nothing more. You are the eternal entity that manifests itself through you, meaning through your body, your mind and all its sences and tools. Your mindset is just one of the tool you can use to create. It’s like software that was developed over thousands of years by millions of people who lived before you. When you associate yourself with this man-made mindset, you give it power. When you stop constantly listening to the mindset, you stop living in the what-if and start living in the what is. You accept things for what they are and become more open to new ideas. There is no need to overcomplicate anything. Take control of your mind, your life and don’t let the collective mindset tell you how to live.
