Group Hysteria

Are you getting what you want out of life? Huh? Are you?

Just wondering if you are treated well. Do you have all the food you need, even more than that?  Is it tasty and alluring still? What about your ride? Are you pleased with its look, performance, feel and sense of luxury or well-being? And your home? Are you proud to say you live there? Do you have many improvements you’d like to see  done to it in the short run?

What about your finances? Are they fairly sound and healthy? Are your bills under control and paid on time? Do you have a nest egg you will rely on for an emergency? How about your retirement plans? Are you building toward them? Adequately?

In your free time do you have meaningful things to do, think about, and act upon? Would you say your life has purpose and meaning? And your family, do they feel the same?

Taking your pulse in the previous few paragraphs should help you assess if things are going well for you. The current social environment makes the assessment difficult, primarily because we aren’t certain about much of anything. I’m thinking uncertainty is a negative itself. With it we turn negative about a lot of things.

In the main, though, if you answered in the positive for most of the items catalogued above, life is good and you are OK.

Headlines, Twitter, Facebook, newsprint and telecasts say otherwise. Of course they do; it is their job to caution the public that problems abound and we must be careful. But when did it become OK to become hysterical about prevailing conditions?

I think it happened when politics invaded the space and made every little thing a plus or minus for one political party or the other. Or one candidate or the other.

Politics has poisoned more wells than drillers can drill. Remember that as you peruse your newsfeeds. If it smacks of politics, then ignore the post. Let it go. It doesn’t help you at all, and consuming it poisons your outlook for the rest of the day.

Hysterics. Public hysterics. It occurs when people without hope with respect to anything they deem important goes against their wishes. In today’s world, that about sums up everything under the sun.

It is time to put away the hysterics. It is time for calm. Do something productive with this day. Feel good about yourself and the world because you did carve out a positive for the day.

Also remind yourself: people in politics earn their stripes by intentionally pissing off people. That’s what they get paid for. The more noise and reaction, the more dollars flow into their pockets.

Let’s let these people starve for the rest of the year! How about that? Just remove them from your Facebook page, website, snail mail, email, etc.

With them out of the picture, we have time and calm with which to focus on real problems and their solutions. I bet we do well with those solutions. They are fun to work on and create. They make all of us more whole.

Have a great weekend!

July 11, 2020