There’s one option that it seems like we always have when times become difficult, times change, feels like things are unravelling, we’re heading into a difficult time.
And, you know, you can maybe think that reasonably we can probably expect that most likely this will not be the total end of the world.
Probably not.
So, you know, many things worse than this have happened before, and things have recovered in one way or another.
Never completely going back to the old way, but also never completely disintegrating into total destruction of the entire world.
I mean, maybe the closest that we’ve gotten to what really could have felt like the end of the world would have been World War II.
I mean, that got pretty bad, went pretty far down into destroying large pieces of the world.
But we look back on that now, and I guess, well, here we are, and we’re about over 70 years after the end of that war, and you know, most of us don’t even think about it.
It’s like well, that’s the whole world that we know, the whole modern history that we can remember is entirely built coming out of that time.
And yet, if it were the late 1930s right now, early 1940s, it really would be quite understandable to feel like “The world is ending. This will be the destruction of everything that we know.”
And indeed, many things didn’t come back.
Many people, places, ways of living, were destroyed in that time, and they never came back.
And yet the world didn’t completely change.
There were big changes, but a lot of the way life was carried on.
In many places, it seemed even barely touched.
And this situation now, I mean, we can always compare it to times in the past.
This situation is not World War II.
This is nowhere near that situation.
World War II, estimated 50 million at least dead.
Cities entirely wiped out.
This is not there.
And yet, it seems like it’s so easy to go into this “the world is ending” kind of mentality.
There’s almost something comforting about it, in that if I can really just say “OK, the world’s ending.
It’s all gonna be destroyed.” It almost like it absolves me of responsibility for, you know, taking care of my own life in my own situation.
It’s like becoming a perfectly passive victim.
The environment will dictate what happens.
“Oh, the world is ending.
There’s nothing I can do about it.” There’s no pressure on me to change my life to do things differently, because it doesn’t matter anyway.
So it’s kind of like this giving up and just resigning to the way things are.
Taking off the pressure of personal responsibility.
Whereas imagine if we felt that the situation right now was an ideal time, that the situation is perfect for- it is full of opportunity, and it’s full of possibility, where anything can happen, and life is good.
Imagine the exact opposite of “the world is falling apart into ruin”.
Then, if your life isn’t great, if you feel like you’re not living up to your potential, then you feel some pressure.
It’s like “Well, if these conditions are so ideal for success, why am I not successful? Clearly I’m doing something wrong.” If, you know, this is ideal conditions.
If I can’t be successful in ideal conditions for success, then there must be something wrong with what I’m doing.
But if the conditions make success impossible, if conditions are “everything is going down the toilet, and we have nothing to look forward to but total destruction”, suddenly my own limitations are irrelevant, and it’s not my fault.
Nothing is my fault.
So there is this strange kind of comfort that can be gained from going into this “end of the world” mentality.
And yet, it seems like time after time that we have these kind of threats where things change and chaos comes in, it never leads to total destruction.
There’s always a new phase coming.
And if we put our energy and attention into “it’s all falling apart”, if that becomes our main focus, then when the recovery comes in, we have achieved nothing.
And in some weird way, it’s almost disappointing when there’s a recovery, because it’s like “Oh, you know, I was banking on the end.
I placed all my bets on the world is ending, and now things are coming back, and I haven’t done anything to improve myself.” So it seems like, as tempting as it can be to sort of resign to a horrible situation, it never seems like the right way to go.
And no matter what this situation, no matter how bad it gets, it’s not going to be total destruction.
And that means that there will be something to come out of this.
Of course, I can’t predict.
I don’t know, maybe it will be, you know.
Of course, I can’t predict the future.
But […] this will most likely be followed by recovery, and therefore it’s not really worth spending our time focusing on how everything is falling apart.
Instead, we can use this time to build the foundations for something new.
#endoftheworld #worldisntending #lifegoeson