This morning, I had a Facebook message from a friend I haven't heard from in a long time.
Well, actually, he's not so much a friend as somebody I got to know online through message boards we both belonged to going back as much as 20 years.
Anyway, he was lamenting (for the 317th time!) about he just never seemed to be able to make it in life and how he pretty much sucks at everything.
In a sense, he is a working example of how your thoughts and intentions create the reality you live in.
Whereas there's little doubt that he is a nice enough person and has a good heart, his entire life focus seems to have been on what is wrong in his life, and how what is wrong in his life is caused by the actions (or inactions) of people and places outside his control.
He has an extreme external focus, in the sense that everything he does is held up on some weird scale of comparison showing how he's not able to do what the people he admires are doing, and therefore his life sucks and he's a failure.
Since I've been fairly closely affiliated with the mental health field for a good 25-30 years, I've tried to offer him various pieces of guidance and general advice, all of which he chooses to ignore, usually with a statement of how it might work for others, but would not work for him. Whereas I'm not claiming that I offer gold plated advice, I'm pretty sure that if he'd actually followed through, his life would be better.
But all these years later, I look at his situation and his ongoing laments — which have not changed in 20 years — and all I see is somebody who is eternally looking for proof (and perhaps permission) for things to be as miserable as he states they are.
Pretty much everything is at fault, and whereas he definitely embraces his own shortcomings — which I'm sure are numerous — those shortcomings are the only thing he embraces. The assorted talents he has, he quietly let slip into the background as "unimportant and not good enough," like somebody who merely plays the guitar because they like to play the guitar complaining that they're going to give up playing the guitar because they're not as good as Eric Clapton.
His eternal insistence that he was born with all these defects both in terms of what his body will stand up to (he does have some genuine allergies and sensitivities) and that they're keeping him from living a good life serves as a poignant reminder to not always focus all our energy on the negative things around us and in our lives and even about our own person.
It's a bit like saying you're a failure at business and shouldn't be bothered with being in business because you're not as successful as Elon Musk. Or you should just stop throwing hoops in your driveway because you’re not as good as Nikola Jokic.
Although this behavior pattern is painfully obvious to people around him he steadfastly insists that he's doing no such thing.
The sad thing about all this is that instead of feeling pleasantly surprised to get a message from an old friend I haven't heard from in long time, it instead felt like a depressive cold shower and my inclination was not to respond at all.
For a few moments I thought about just being snarky and sending back a link to this video clip of inspirational speaker Nick Vujicic but decided not to. After all, what is the point? This person has already made-up his mind about what reality looks like and the only thing he's willing to listen to his confirmation that his perception of reality is correct.
In a strange and twisted way, it reminds me a little bit of the polarity we see in the political world, where people decide that their candidate represents something specific regardless of any and all proof to the contrary.
It's amazing and sad what people can persuade themselves of...
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Created at 2025.02.03 01:43 PST
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