Hexagram 26 > 8
Or: Why Choosing Your Bullet Wound Is The Most Empowering Thing You Can Do
To some, the "this is fine" dog looks to be caught in some self-deluding coping mechanism that's taken over at the end of his life.
Maybe because I'm crazy, I now can see it also as an illustration of empowerment.
There's a lot of things you can't choose.
Whether you have three arms, whether lottery balls levitate and land in your favor, or whether age etches lines into your visage.
But we have more choice than we might imagine. And if we're focusing on internal things rather than externals, our opportunity for choice multiplies.
Amidst crushing blows from fate, a change in perspective can do the retaliatory punching for us. The right choices can stave off defeat when we feel the imprints of its teeth on our limbs.
Wanting what you have, even when what you have is considered less than ideal is a cheat code for our day-to-day life.
What follows is what I've found to be most helpful in choosing better perspectives to alleviate the everyday pains we're bound to face. I hope they work for you as well.
Comparing Yourself To Others (The Bad Way)
Morgan Housel, in his book 'Same as Ever', mentions that so many Americans look back fondly at our post-World-War-2 world as some golden age (race and gender is probably skewed here). But why is that? Housel says:
"If you look at the 1950s and ask, “What was different that made it feel so great?” this is at least part of your answer. The gap between you and most of the people around you wasn’t that large. It created an era when it was easy to keep your expectations in check because few people in your social circle lived dramatically better than you did.
Many (but not all) Americans could look around and find that not only were they living comfortable lives, they were living lives that were just about as comfortable as those around them whom they compared themselves to."
That's not all that possible for us now.
Social media has skewed our perceptions. Influencer perks, and even the illusion of influencer perks makes us see strangers as their own form of celebrity.
The build-up of billionaires makes us see CEOs as a Porky the Pig carnita mirage.
Others 'getting' feels like ours being taken. And with tax breaks to the biggest earners, and the breakdown of safety net benefits, it's understandable.
But we're no better off by blasting out bitterness next to our digital avatars. And we're done no favors by measuring ourselves up against filtered faces, and filler-filled faces.
So, what's the right way of going about this. Or, if not right, what's the most helpful and practical way of dealing with this? There's a few things I've found helpful.
Comparing Yourself To Others (In A Helpful Way)
" ... it is up to us to choose the people to whom we compare ourselves. This allows us to rig the contest. Whether or not this is good philosophy, it is helpful psychology."
- Ward Farnsworth — ‘The Practicing Stoic’
There's a risk in benefitting from comparing ourselves to others. It risks being the therapeutic version of pushing someone in front of a bullet meant for you.
But, if you do it with as much respect as possible, and privately at that, no one is likely to be actively harmed.
Where is the ammo for this psychological exercise? One place is the land of news headlines, full of the modern Oedipus and Herculean figures, the new Atlases, the new men and women having their innards pecked away by birds.
Our modern news cycle is not far off from being modern mythology. And it can impart the same kinds of lessons.
So, instead of partaking in the perniciousness with popcorn, we can see these misfortunes and feel blessed to be able to choose our own problems:
"If we were all to bring our misfortunes into a common store, so that each person should receive an equal share in the distribution, the majority would be glad to take up their own and depart."
- Plutarch, Letter to Apollonius 9 (106b) via ‘The Practicing Stoic’
There's a lot of truth in that. In working with the homeless, in having spent 23 years in the projects, in seeing violence inflicted on others, I've gotten ample examples of circumstances that make me tolerate, and even embrace, my own battle scars and open wounds. While simultaneously saying a prayer for everyone else's setbacks.
Everyone can become an obituary, or the recipient of disapproving shaken heads, so if you choose your life instead of the one you think has more suffering, it's important to stay humble as well.
Choosing Your Present Disasters Over Your Past Ones
Another way of approaching this whole choice thing is choosing our present circumstances over our past problems.
It's a false binary. A choice that can't literally change history, but by executing it in your mind, it can often be enough to change a mood, and your resolve.
Ex: Choosing your difficult work day instead of the time you stabbed yourself in the neck
Or
Choosing your current relationship problem over the vast stretch of the struggling single life desert that you endured years ago.
Or
Choosing a loss of a pet over having never known and loved it.
It's all a matter of perspective. Seeing the same things under different lighting. Or taking your current wisdom over your past ignorant self-satisfaction.
Even if the present is worse than anything you've ever experienced in the past, you can compare that to hypothetical worse scenarios. Like choosing the now over having all of your family struck down by a terrorist cell.
Or, you can compare to lives you're grateful for not leading. Like choosing the now over a character's existence that the worst screenwriter wouldn't wish upon the eyes and ears of an audience.
Or, you can compare your current wisdom to your past ignorance.
Or, if your day is dragging, choosing now over being at work two hours ago, with a full eight hours staring back at you.
There's a power in having a choice. Even if the choice only involves being deliberate about choosing a helpful perspective.
Final Thoughts
This is a subtle mental maneuver. You're simply holding up two mental images, or scenarios, and choosing the one that's better in that moment.
By simply comparing the two, you'll naturally lean towards one over the other. And that moment is enough to shift your emotions (from my experience).
Olivia Fox Cabane wrote about this in her book, 'The Charisma Myth':
“Our brains are wired first to understand, then to believe, and last to disbelieve. Since disbelief requires additional cognitive effort, we get the physiological effects first. And, though this belief may last only a brief moment, it’s enough to produce an emotional and physical reassurance, which can change our thought patterns as well as help alleviate the uncomfortable feelings.”
I believe *that's* essentially the mechanism behind why choosing whatever you're facing in the moment works.
Choosing one ill over another doesn't mean an absence of self-defense. It doesn't mean letting the world terrorize you and the less fortunate. It doesn't mean sitting on your palms when a weapon is formed against you in another's.
It's about choosing to be resilient over restless. It's choosing to be as unassailable as a human mind can possibly be when thoughts as sharp as arrows are looking to penetrate your consciousness.
Life sucks sometimes, but a sudden shift in how you see things can keep you bobbing above the surface instead of slipping into the sea with no salvation in sight.
You're not lying to yourself about your present circumstances, you're reminding yourself that it can always be worse. But fortunately, we can keep finding new ways to swim.