Take The Time To Acknowledge How Silly You Look

It’s like a bad movie.

Imagine you’re watching a movie of yourself and it sucks.

Imagine that the theater doors are locked and there’s nothing you can do to escape the misery of having to watch yourself whine and complain or struggle to turn off the alarm and get out of bed.

Having to watch yourself complain to your friends about your lack of time only to wonder how in the previous scene you are finding the time to watch TV or play a game or even talk to friends.

Having to watch yourself endure another miserable day at a miserable 9–5 (because you say it’s miserable, not anyone else…) and yet not see you endure the struggle of what it takes to rid yourself of it and create the life you want.

Having to watch yourself care too much about what any and everyone thinks.

Having to watch yourself value everyone’s opinion but your own.

Having to watch yourself neglect yourself over and over.

Having to watch yourself act like a city without walls, broken and without autonomy and agency and self-governance over your own mind.

Having to watch yourself drown yourself in alcohol and surround yourself with pessimistic energy-sucking losers who make you feel better about your misery.

Having to watch yourself neglect all areas of your life — relationships, finances, career, health & vitality, spirituality, etc.

Having to watch yourself talk about your “dreams” and what you’re going to do while you roll your eyes as you remember just 30 minutes ago in the film you were sulking on the couch downing a bag of chips.

You’re too engrossed in yourself and your own shit.

You already know that your life is miserable from within because you can feel it, yet you don’t do anything about it because you’ve become used to it. You actively self-sabotage to uphold a sense of normalcy you’ve hardened over time.

Once you learn to see yourself from outside of yourself, you will realize how silly and delusional you look. Only then can you begin to change.

Once you can look at your life from outside it, you’ll realize that you’re responsible for how it’s playing out.

You’ll realize that you are actively choosing and crafting your life through your habits whether those choices are consciously made or not.

It’s like a bad movie.

You’ll see yourself complain and complain and do nothing about it. You’ll see yourself make the same mistakes over and over and never learn from them. You’ll see yourself longing for a better life while shotgunning a beer to the title sequence of the latest show on HBOMax.

Look, we all love flawed protagonists because we relate to them. We are flawed ourselves, after all.

But no one wants to see a flawed character who never grows.

When that happens, what do we typically do? “Oh man, that movie sucks! The main character was a PAIN. There was like, NO character development even after all they’ve been through!!”

What’s funny is that a “lack of character development” is probably the most realistic thing a story could do because humans don’t “develop”.

Even though it’s possible, humans don’t “change”. Humans aren’t “interesting”.

They are predictable, delusional, pessimistic. They seek the appreciation of others who all have those same traits and lack faith in themselves to achieve anything.

Humans are all of these things. Very few go on to be exceptional and interesting. Very few go on to accomplish their dreams as opposed to letting it waste and wither away in the graveyard.

That’s realism for you, but I think we can all agree that it makes for a shitty story.

No one is saying that you once you accomplish your dreams you are no longer flawed. No, you will still have some flaws because we aren’t perfect. However, no one wants to watch a movie of a protagonist who blames their problems on said flaws and uses it as an excuse to never change.

We all love the comeback story. We all love to root for the underdog. We all love to see someone broken like us become exceptional and actualize their dreams despite all odds because it gives us hope that it’s possible.

Hope isn’t enough on its own, but it damn sure is contagious.

The great Medium writer Ayodeji Awosika said the other day that we are the observer of our thoughts, not the thoughts themselves, and only when we realize that our thoughts aren’t true can we can begin to detach ourselves from them.

Thinking of your life as a movie is acting as the observer of yourself and your thoughts. It’ll help you to realize how silly you look and how bad a movie this is that you are being forced to endure.

The great thing is that you have the control to change your movie and change your story, but you can only do that if you have the courage to look at yourself from outside yourself and admit it’s a pitiful sight.

Jordan Peterson once said:

Look, you aren’t your problems. You’re most fundamentally that which if it confronts its problems can solve them.

To confront them you have to acknowledge them, and to acknowledge them you need to step outside of your life for a moment because you’ve become too accustomed to the misery whether you realize it or not — that’s why you continue to indulge in it.

Change your story, change your life. Remember you are capable, and become a force to be reckoned with my friends.