podcast

Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. Thanks for joining me. There are a lot of worrisome things happening in the world right now. Everything from different political developments to natural disasters, to wars, to different climate and environmental problems, pollution. These things can feel overwhelming and can start to give you the sense that things are getting worse and worse and the future is not bright. There was a time in my life between 20 and 10 years ago where I was sure that the future was pretty dark. I was reading some books that were not giving me a lot of hope for how to solve different problems that we are facing as a society, and my mind was just really filled with the problems that we face, and I didn't see a solution. I didn't feel like the future that my kids were gonna inherit was a good one. I didn't see any way for it to be good. And this ended up affecting me in many ways, not just the way that I was feeling as far as depression, but also in in my body, in my energy levels, in my motivations, in my behavior. And we've talked about why this is, we've talked about how emotions are made up of a lot more than just the happy, sad feeling, but they actually affect different systems that are turned on and off in our bodies, different hormones that are emitted. And we've talked about how there are kind of two different responses to stress, how there's good stress and there's bad stress. How the good stress is where you look at the future and you believe that your resources are gonna be up to the demands that are before, before you. And the bad stress is the opposite, where you look at the future and you see these demands and you just don't see how your resources can meet them. And so your body goes into a state where it just tries to minimize loss. And this really describes my experience during this time. I was extremely depressed during this time. I felt very dark. I felt overwhelmed and exhausted most of the time. Whenever I did have free time, I didn't feel energy to do anything particularly productive. I would just retreat. I would go into reading different fluff novels, or escaping into movies. I didn't feel like I was up to doing new hard things. I just avoided them. I didn't feel up to creating things. I was basically just withdrawing from the world and feeling very, very depressed. This period of depression was kind of long lasting, but it reached a point where it just wasn't sustainable. I just, I, I needed to find some new ways to deal with life because I just couldn't continue. And so over time, I've told about different aspects of my story different times on this podcast, but I learned more about emotions and how they work, and I learned more about bad stress and good stress, and I learned about how having an assessment of the future that the demands are just too much for you and too much for the human race is going to give you these results that I was seeing in my life. And so I learned over time, some by intuition and some by study, different coping mechanisms that helped me to have a different generalized um, appraisal of the future. And so instead of seeing the future as dark, seeing everything is getting worse, seeing as there's no solution to our problems, the demands are just too much for us, I started to see things in a different way, and I started to believe that we had resources to solve the problems that were up against. And this started to affect me personally in a very different way. So to compare myself today with that self of 15, 20 years ago, today, I feel a lot more motivation and excitement about connecting with people in a lot more meaningful ways. I have that a lot more energy to give to the people around me in my family, in my community. I feel motivated. I feel like I can do things that I've never done before. The world hasn't changed that much. The problems are still there. Some of the problems are maybe even a little bit worse, but my outlook on them has changed and that changes my ability to show up for the people in my life and show up for the issues that I can do something about in a really different way. And I just feel better. So I could really see illustrated in myself the effect of the threat appraisal versus the challenge appraisal, the threat response to stress versus the challenge response to stress, and how that affected my ability to enjoy my life, to contribute to trying to help, to do something about the problems that are around me. It really was a difference between being stuck in avoidance mode where I'm just trying to minimize loss. The, that emotional equivalent of curling up in a ball, putting your hands over your head while a bear attacks you. That was kind of my, my mode during that period of my life 20, 15, 10 years ago. So how you view the future really affects how you're able to show up right now and how you're able to deal with the problems that are in within your reach right now. So it's more than just an intangible, fluffy view of how things are gonna work out. It's something that will actually affect in your day to day, the amount of energy you have, your stamina, your ability to persist in the face of challenges. All of these things will be affected along with just your emotional feelings, depending on how you view how the future can shape up.

So I wanted to share today some concrete ways that I have learned to cultivate a challenge outlook on the future rather than a threat outlook, meaning a view that we can actually find the resources to meet our problems that we face as a human race, a belief that we can actually have a bright future.
One of the things that has really helped me to cultivate this challenge mindset is to zoom out a little bit from the different problems that we face and see them in the context of history. It's kind of like when you are watching a child learn to walk. At first, the child falls down all the time, and sometimes they hurt themselves really badly. They get bruises, sometimes they bonk their head and cut themselves. And if you zoom in on any one of these falls, or any one particular hour of their efforts to learn how to walk, you might feel like this is really going badly. This child is hurting themselves so much. They're hurting themselves a lot more than they ever did before they started to try to walk, and I just don't see how this can work out. This is a bad idea. This is dangerous. Whereas if you zoom out a little bit more and you see the progression over several days, over a couple weeks, you see how the child over time starts falling less and less how they start to have more confidence and more stability in more and more physical situations. And so it's important to be able to put it in context to, to be able to see what it is that is happening over time in general, to see the trends that are happening, even though in the short term there might be a lot more hurt and falling than what's happening before they started to walk. I had to learn to do a similar type of thing when I was really sick with long COVID and I was in this process of healing that was extremely slow and extremely long, and there was someone that posted a graph on my support group that I, that I really loved, and I printed out, I put it on my wall. It was a graph that, for those of you who are just listening, I'm gonna describe it, but it's a graph that shows healing and there's an axis where your improvement in healing is on one side, and then the time is on the other side. The passage of time is on the other side and it shows the line in the graph shows that over time you are improving little by little over time. But in the short term, this, this line is sometimes very squiggly. It's not a straight diagonal from worse to better really consistently over time, but the line zigzags back and forth over that straight diagonal so that you might have some days where you feel a lot better, and then the next day you may feel way worse than you did before. And so you'll have these setbacks and you'll have these downturns, but that over time your setbacks are a little bit less bad than they were before. And that the line is gradually, even though in a squiggly manner, it is gradually going up. You are gradually healing over time. And I had to look at that graph a lot to give myself a way to view my setbacks in a more hopeful manner. But I do the same type of thing when I'm looking at history and I try and back up and I see the context of things that are happening right now in the context of a large historical line. One thing that can really help you to see that we have come a long way as a human race is to compare different norms from Roman times to the norms today. So in ancient Rome, if you were a man that had any kind of position of power and you had some servants and you had some slaves, it was perfectly acceptable and expected that you would force yourself on these slaves sexually, and you would think no more about it than you would about relieving yourself on the side of the road when you needed to pee. It was just something that was just so totally normal. There was no such thing as hospitals back then. Only the rich could ever get treatment, private doctors for their ailments, but the poor were just left to suffer and die. There was, there was no collective effort to help people who were sick. Unwanted children were really commonly just left by the roadside in a garbage heap or dropped down drains. This was so normal that pretty much every society besides, even besides the Romans just took it for granted. And girls especially, were often left by the roadside because they weren't as often wanted as boys. And the girls that were rescued from death by the roadside were usually raised as slaves. And brothels were full of women who had been abandoned by their parents as infants. And this was just normal. This was just the way things were. There was no public outcry about it because everyone accepted it. It was just the way things were supposed to be. Slavery was condoned. It was just sanctioned by society as the way things should be. And yeah, we haven't totally eliminated slavery in our society, but it's not something that all of society views as totally right, totally acceptable. Even the philosophers back in those ancient times thought that slavery was the way that things should be. Aristotle, for example, he said "that one should command and another obey is not just necessary but expedient." He saw it as the natural order of things, the way that things were supposed to be. That was the assumption, was that slavery was supposed to be in place. It was the right way for things to be. The heroes of the Iliad, for example, they scorned the weak in the downtrodden. They didn't raise up pity as a value to be respected. If someone had pity, it was something that could undermine your control as a wise person. And so we still have a long way to come in our society, but we have come a long way. We have different assumptions now than we used to in those ancient times about what was okay, what was right, what makes for a just society. And if you want a good book that can help you to be more aware of these types of things, I'd recommend this book called Dominion by Tom Holland. He's a British historian and it really helps you to see different things over time that have changed in society in our basic assumptions, the way that we see the world, the way that we view what should happen and what should not happen. But anyway, getting this zoomed out view of history helps me to realize that we have come a long way and that in many ways things are improving. And it helps me to believe that things will continue to improve, that those injustices that we have not eliminated yet will be eliminated in the future.

Another thing that I like to do is to consciously collect stories of ways that people all around the world are contributing toward a better future for us. And of course, you know that I collect some of these on this podcast with the kindness narrative. I love doing this. This is actually really great for me personally because I listen to these kindness narratives many times. I listen to them when they're sent to me, and then I have to listen to them many times as I'm editing them and putting them in the audio and the, and the video version of the podcast. And so these stories are just always running around in my mind all day long. People from all over the world who are being kind. And sometimes these stories are so small, they're just little acts. Sometimes they're big things. But I see how much they impact the people who are telling the stories and how they can change people's lives. How they can change people's outlook, how they can induce healing, and how they can have ripple effects. And I like to just imagine a band or a huge army of people all around the world working for a better future. I also look for other stories on the news and other outlets of people who are working hard to solve different issues that we have. And as I imagine all of these people working together, I start to see that all of our minds United can make a difference for a great future for us.
I had a friend who had a period in her life that was really difficult for her. She was going through a lot of family issues and a lot of employment issues. It was just an extremely difficult time, and nowadays her life is a lot better. A lot of those, most of those problems that she was facing during that past time have been solved. They have worked out, a lot of them in ways that she couldn't have predicted. And she talks about how she really would like to go back to that past version of herself and be able to comfort her and be able to tell her, Hey, you know this and this worked out and you met this this person and this opportunity came up and this, you learned this and this helped with that. And so when she has problems nowadays, she says that she imagines a future version of herself coming back and comforting the present version version of herself and telling her all of the ways, all of the different things that happen, the serendipities, the surprises, the experiences, that helped her to be able to solve this problem. It's really hard for us to connect the dots toward problem solving when we look out toward the future, but when you look to the past, you can see how things became connected and things worked together to be able to help you toward a better resolution. And so thinking in this manner helps me to imagine how in the future things can connect and work out and I can learn things and other people can learn things, and things can be invented and people can have creative ideas that can help us to solve our problems collectively.

So these are just three little things that I do that help me to have a challenge mindset, a challenge response toward the future of this world. And the one is to zoom out from our, the present experiences and put them in the context of history. And then the second is to see this army of people doing kind things all over the world and imagine them all working in their own little sphere and how this starts to create change in all different places in the world. And the third is to be able to connect the dots as I look back on problems that I've had in the past and see how they have been resolved and imagine myself in the future coming back and comforting my present self and telling me all of the ways that things worked out and all of the surprising things that happened that helped for things to find a resolution.

So those are just some ideas. If you have more, please share them with me by email or by Instagram. And also stay tuned now for our kindness narrative. And thanks to everybody who's already shared yours. Enjoy this kindness narrative now, and thanks for listening today, and we'll see you next time.

There was a time of my life when I became fascinated by wilderness survival. I would study about it and I would try and practice what I could here and there, and I established this goal of having my own survival trip. I planned this trip so that I'd be alone out in the mountains without any food and without much gear for a few days, and I studied for months. I planned the details out and I made it happen. I wasn't really thorough with my planning though, and I made some mistakes I wouldn't do nowadays. I didn't actually plan what I would do after my trip was over, and so I didn't bring a phone with me or any money. And looking back, I wonder what my thought process had been. The survival trip was a life-changing experience, but during those days I wasn't able to find enough food and I had lost lots of weight. When I was done, I was heading back to civilization. I came across a small agricultural town a few hours away from where I had been. I was far away from home and actually had hardly eaten anything in days. Some people I passed on the dirt roads out there saw me and they quickly got into their houses and closed their doors, and I was just a skinny young man, all dirty and messy long hair and a machete strapped my waist. And, uh, I probably look threatening to some people out there. And I walked until I came to this bar called Paradise Bar and there was a phone there I could use. So I called my mother and I let her know I was okay and I needed help getting back home. The old couple that ran the bar, they were just sitting behind the counter, there was no one else in the bar, just watching me. And after a while I was sitting there waiting for, for my mom to show up at some moment and bring me home. Uh, it was gonna take a while 'cause I was far away from home a few hours away. And he just came up to me and gave me a big plate of food and I, I told him that I had no way of paying for it, but he didn't seem to care too much. He insisted that I, that I eat. So I did and then he gave me more. And then he gave me, he just kept feeding me. He gave me fruit, he gave me more food. And until I was satisfied and I hadn't eaten anything in at least a couple days, I was very, very, very hungry. And this man who could have easily just judged me and maybe thought I could have been threatening or just bothersome that I was in his place and I didn't smell good and I was all dirty. And instead of judging me, he just decided to to love me. And. And to make sure that I was gonna be okay and make sure that I was well fed. And this act of kindness has really impacted me and changed the way I want to act towards others, and it's been a really, really profound experience for me. I'm very grateful for people who are willing to help other people out, even when they don't look like someone you'd want to help. Very grateful for that.