Thanksgiving is a holiday of excess. We get together with loads of people to eat an exorbitant amount of food which has too many processed components while we overdue it on drink only to wake up the next day and max out our credit card fueled debt to the limit on Black Friday to buy still overpriced stuff we don’t need. This extreme holiday is a scarily accurate parallel of where humanity feels like it’s heading. Political far wingery seems unprecedented. Mass shootings are at all time highs. Unrest follows suit. Media (social and non) is bringing out the worst in us, and truthfully I’m starting to find it difficult to tell what the fuck is actually happening out in the world with so much misinformation spewed alongside hate, propaganda and unfiltered opinion. Is this what humanity wants? Do we actually at the end of the day enjoy living this way? I sure don’t. Living in New Orleans, the murder capital of America, compounds this for me locally. I don’t feel safe walking outside of my home, and I’m a 6’2, 28 year old male who works out everyday and is in really good shape. I actually fear for my life and those of my loved ones. There are neighborhoods I will not go to, and even the ones I do I’m always on alert. Somebody cut me off in traffic? Not worth even worth honking the horn. I’ve tried that and the offender then tried to intentionally crash into me and murder me by running me off the road. True story. Luckily he didn’t follow me and pull out a gun to end my life for good. A guy talking shit or being unacceptably rude on the street out in public? There is a material chance he has a weapon on him, and I don’t trust his judgment so I ignore it every time. Short of assaulting (or worse) me or my loved ones, it’s too risky to tell him to stfu. I know I’m not alone feeling like the world is going crazy. But is it really? Even typing these facts and anecdotes out, I’m hopeful about our future. I know the hate mongers who control what the masses see, read and consume in their preordained information diet are profiting from our fear. They know exactly how to push our cave people brains to the absolute limit. Hate sells. So what are we to do about it? I have a theory. I believe it starts at home with our routines. Are we CONSISTENTLY… - Eating healthy foods? - Exercising? - Processing our emotions? - Unplugging from technology? - Fact checking everything we’re exposed to? - Spending less than we make & saving/investing the rest? - Reading / learning and becoming more intelligent? - Going outside and being wild animals (in the good way)? - Sharing quality time with loved ones without relying on technology? - Reminding ourselves of what we’re grateful for on a daily basis? If we are to combat the problem of extremity, we must first get back to basics and make sure we’re taking care of ourselves. We need to work on our fundamentals. Amateurs lose games due to unforced errors. Let’s not do that in our daily lives. How does this relate to mass shootings and the other truly extreme events happening today? Well, if we’re playing the game right at a basic level, we prevent ourselves from getting too far out of whack. Like a car getting regular maintenance. If we don’t eat right, we’re more likely to get irritable, which could lead us to damage a relationship at work, which could lead to unemployment, then homelessness, then crime. Slippery slope. Less extreme, if we don’t eat right, then our body develops an unhealthy relationship with dopamine which can lead us to make poor decisions. We experience decision fatigue after having to make too many choices, and that threshold is significantly weaker (we hit the wall sooner) when we eat poorly. So we have a burrito instead of grilled fish. Then because of that first bad decision we decide to go out drinking instead of staying at home and reading. We end up spending too much at the bar and put ourselves in a tough spot. All the stress piles on and then we see an old friend share their opinion about politics. Instead of being able to deploy empathy, we rage and spew venom. Out of 500 friends who see it, someone else is having a bad spiral sequence too and do the same back to us. We see red, shoot back, damage relationships, become more entrenched in our stance, etc. All because of one mediocre burrito. Not worth it. My theory may seem like a stretch if you read it back to front, but the impact of a decision early on can and will snowball. Every choice we make affects us in some way, even if we don’t see it. The music we listen to brainwashes us slowly. We learn the words, it repeats unconsciously, we get influenced. The easiest way to get back to the great parts of life is to refocus on those early, easy decisions. Taking a walk instead of watching an episode of tv. Eating salmon instead of a burrito. Course correct early on in the spiral and we empower ourselves to continue making net positive decisions. Front run the snowball and make it compound positively for ourselves. It’s the only way. For the most part, all of our discontent as humans is self inflicted. Unhealthy, unhappy, poor, etc. We choose whether we realize it or not by the actions we take and the resulting stories we tell ourselves to justify those actions. Hard to mentally be open and curious once you’ve bashed an opposite party member for their beliefs publicly on social media. Hard to enjoy the niceties of wealth when you’re cursing the “1%” for all of their horribleness and telling yourself money is the root of all evil. We brainwash ourselves constantly, either by the people we listen to, books we read, music we put on, information we consume, narratives we buy into, etc. If we’re going to do it, we might as well do it with empowering and self serving content. Let’s remind ourselves to do the fundamentals consistently and take care of ourselves like we need and deserve. I think we’ll find life is much better that way, and since we only have one of them, we might as well make it grand.