Idk woke up empty today
Opened my eyes to yet another morning of fighting (is very common for me)
I just wanted to leave, is really hard to live with siblings that don't help you nor pitch in.
I try my best to handle all my responsibilities just beacuse I don't wanna wake up every morning to a shouting match.
Im in the middle ground that I wanna move out yet I dont want to beacuse I dont wanna be alone.(pathetic I know)
When my mother was driving me to work, ofc she was venting and shit I basically told her that humanity is useless and just exploded in anger.
She basically texted me this:
"It is very hard and difficult for you to see everything so bad and negative. Where is the positive in you?"
"The way you see life is not the responsibility of others. It's how you want to see it."
Ik she is right about this bit I can't see the "positive side" to anything anymore. How do I tell her that life for me isn't even enjoyable anymore. But sure maybe I'm not trying hard enough to seem happy (sarcasm btw)
Hmm…
The idea that
"life is the way you want to see it" always gets me thinking of ways in which we could replace that phrase with something more useful.
Your brain is simply a part of your body after all, and just like any other part of your body, it is subject to its own external circumstances. Just as your lungs can get infected by harmful pathogens, so too can your mind be "infected" by harmful thoughts.
Nevertheless, generating thoughts is exactly what our brains exist to do. Blaming yourself (or anyone else) for having excessive negative thoughts is akin to blaming yourself for having excessive mucus from a runny nose. Would you tell a sick person to
"just stop having a runny nose, idiot" while they are sick?
Of course not. That's both obviously silly and fundamentally unhelpful to solving the problem. But since emotional problems are far less understood or tolerated than physical ones, that is still the reaction people typically give to our mental suffering:
"life is the way you see it"
Or to put that phrase another way:
"It's YOUR fault you are so negative." Ouch.
But is that actually
true?
Well… if you'll humor me, I'd like to run a brief thought experiment:
I want you to imagine that you and me (we are bffs in this story, fucking deal with it) are walking through the local park while having a friendly conversation about where we should go to lunch afterward.
Then, all of a sudden, a giant male baboon with an enormous red monkey asshole jumps out of the bushes and just starts
screaming at us like crazy.
I try desperately to defend you from its enormous monkey fangs, but it nearly bites my arm off in the process. I manage to get the monkey in a chokehold (I am very cool and athletic) but its teeth are still lodged in my arm. Despite my strongest efforts, I am slowly starting to bleed out.
One moment everything was perfectly normal… and now my life is meeting its cruel, monkey-themed end. You run to get help while I die a heroic death.
Cool story, right? I've just got one question to ask you:
While you are running away to get help for me while I am in the maw of the enormous monkey,
are you still thinking about what we should eat for lunch?
Of course not, right? You are thinking about how you just witnessed a giant baboon (with a huge red ass) maul your bestest bff to death. Even the concept of thinking about lunch right now sounds insane.
This (admittedly very stupid) baboon analogy is a useful introduction to the concept of
bottom-up (no pun intended) thought processing.
Bottom-up thought processing is when a
stimulus from your external environment leads you to have specific thoughts. It is one of two different modes of thought that humans possess, the other being
Top-down thought (when we
choose a topic of thought for ourselves based on existing information, like where we want to eat for lunch).
In bottom-up processing, an external stimulus triggers us to have a thought response or emotional reaction. (Like how a sudden monkey makes us feel fear)
In top-down processing, an intentional mental process leads us to make a choice about our own behavior. (A conversation about lunch leads us to make a choice of where to go next)
Got it? Here is why this concept is important for conversations like this:
The vast, vast majority of what we think and feel is the result of bottom-up thought processing, NOT top-down thought processing.
Or to put it another way, the vast majority of what we think and feel on a daily basis is the direct result of our immediate environment and thus beyond our own control.
We can choose how to
react to a giant monkey jumping out of nowhere, but we can't simply choose not to feel fear, or choose for the monkey's presence to not violently interrupt our previous train of thought.
In this sense, the phrase
"life is how you choose to see it" is obviously untrue. The way that we "see" life is quite literally the product of what life itself throws at us. To simply tell us to
"see life a different way" and ignore a giant, screaming monkey in our immediate environment is absolutely ridiculous.
Having the thought
"humanity is useless" is not some personal choice that you yourself decided to make, it is a fairly reasonable, automatic assessment of the immediate physical and emotional environment that you find yourself in. Nobody is born believing that humanity sucks ass, after all.
So is your mother just wrong? Kind of. It's more that the simplistic statement itself is wrong, but the complex message she's TRYING to give is still true.
Here's a good example:
Remember when I used the "runny nose" analogy before?
Although blaming someone for having a runny nose is obviously stupid and unhelpful, blaming someone for having a runny nose if you keep seeing them licking the underside of people's dirty socks makes perfect sense.
Although you can't simply choose not to have negative thoughts any more than you can simply choose to stop having a runny nose, you
CAN choose to engage in actions that decrease the likelihood of getting a runny nose in the first place.
Just as the thoughts that our brains automatically generate are the result of our environments, so too can we ourselves change our environments in order to influence how we think.
Can you prevent an escaped baboon from randomly crossing your path? No.
Can you prevent yourself from jumping into the baboon enclosure at your local zoo? Yes.
Telling another person that you think humanity is useless is akin to sneezing on them. Your own negativity becomes an infection that you pass on to someone else, which is why people often react with such visible anger to statements like those. Your own sickness decreases THEIR mental health, thus lowering the likelihood that either of your mental states will improve.
But (and this is the most-important part) trying to keep our social environments "clean" of negativity is FAR from the only thing we can do to influence our bottom-up reactions.
Just as we can do physical exercises to change the composition of our own bodies, so too can we do mental exercises to change the composition of our own minds, like mindfulness practices, meditation, gratitude, etc.
SchrodingerisDed already recommended a simple gratitude practice earlier in this thread, and while we
do have good evidence that actively practicing gratitude influences what kind of thoughts our minds generate in response to the outside world, I would personally advise AGAINST trying to fight off negative thoughts or feelings using gratitude as a primary method.
Trying to cover up negative/ungrateful thoughts with positive/grateful ones is kind of like trying to replace a glass full of spoiled milk with fresh lemonade…
by pouring the lemonade directly into the milk.
Technically if you do that for long enough you will eventually purge the milk from the glass, but a better solution would obviously be to get rid of the milk first.
Therefore, practices that are oriented towards
weakening negative thought rather than
strengthening positive thought tend to be a better place to start. That is what basic meditation and mindfulness is for. Gratitude practices can wait.
Jesus, sorry this message got so long. I'll end off like this:
Your mind is like a houseplant. While you cannot force a plant to grow by yelling at it (
believe me, I've tried) you
can change the environment you place it in, and the frequency with which you water it.
Don't ever bother beating yourself up over not being "positive" enough. It just doesn't accomplish anything. Focus on doing what you can each day, and allow your default emotional responses to slowly change on their own.
Life is hard enough as it is. Don't ever let other people convince you that you should beat yourself up using your own mind in order to punish your mind for the contents of your mind.
Because that's fucking crazy.
