The Greatest Reset
Are you ready for the Great Reset?
Hey you great survivor you, it’s been a while!
Almost a year actually, since I last wrote.
I’ll get into the reasons for that shortly, but for now I just want to say congratulations for making it this far, in whatever shape you’ve managed to maintain during these two crazy years, both physically and mentally.
For all intents and purposes, fingers crossed, we may be over the hump with this pandemic.
What I believe we’re only just at the beginning of though; what I hope we’re at the beginning of, is analyzing what we did right with COVID, and what we got wrong. Because boy, do we have some trust to rebuild...
Now, before I go any further here, I want to make something crystal clear.
I’m not interested in politics.
I’m not interested in left vs right.
What I’m interested in is observing.
Observing the decisions we make.
Observing the things we do, or don’t believe.
Observing the stories we tell ourselves.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know it’s my belief that perception, how we see, helps shape our reality; helps shape the very world we live in.
Whilst this has always been important, it’s even more so now as we find ourselves at one of the most critical points in human history.
How we see, is under threat...
I know, I know...
Some of you are thinking “Hang on a minute, media has been influencing how we see since its inception; this is not new” and you would be correct.
But something has changed.
Something has shifted and I fear, if left unaddressed, will lead us down a dangerous road.
A road I’m not super excited to head down...
I’ve been saying for years that we’re living in a post truth world; that it is simply impossible to know, with any degree of certainty, what is fact vs fiction in what is reported to us.
My fear, is that if we continue down this path, the inevitable conclusion will be:
ONE channel of information.
ONE “trusted” source.
ONE controlling narrative.
In a nutshell, totalitarianism.
I don’t think any of us really want that.
Or do we?
Let me share with you a little of my experience over the past two years; I’m sure many will relate.
Physically, the pandemic was challenging in that I need to stay active, and as was the case with all of us, staying active with all of the closures was difficult, but not impossible.
Mentally was a whole other ball game...
As if the challenges of restrictions, shutdowns; fear and anxiety over a silent, invisible enemy weren’t enough, I watched us split into separate camps. Watched one story amplified and another quashed; yesterday’s conspiracy turn into tomorrow’s fact; watched friendships dissolve and relationships fall apart. Our leaders didn’t help, far from it.
For the first time in my life, I began to sink into a deep depression.
Over time, I felt myself giving up.
I gave up on you.
I gave up on myself.
I gave up on us.
Basically, I gave up hope.
Not a great place to find yourself, you have to admit, when you’re a “motivational speaker” ...
But there I was.
I couldn’t even imagine being in a room with people, couldn’t even imagine speaking again...
I had nothing to say, nothing to add to the conversation. No reason for being...
Something interesting happens when you hit rock bottom; there’s nowhere else to go.
Paradoxically, when there’s nowhere to go, you can go anywhere...
Now is probably a good time to give a language warning, because here’s a change I’m making in how I communicate moving forward. I’m being more “me”.
Being more “me” means, that just like in real life, I swear.
Sometimes, a lot...
What turned things around for me is that one day, I just got up and decided that I didn’t give a flying fuck which way the world chose to go.
“You want to live in a fantasy world where we can’t discuss, like adults, what might be going on here?”
Fine.
“You want someone else to decided, some “trusted source”, what’s true, and what might be “mis” or “dis” information?”
Fine.
That’s not a world I want to live in, but you have at it.
Let’s get real here for a minute.
We’ve had a relatively easy ride here for a couple of decades, for most of us in the west you could say our entire lives. But we are on the verge on some big changes.
What was not long ago spoken about only by “conspiracy theorists”, the Great Reset is coming.
I don’t know exactly what that means.
I wish they (the World Economic Forum) would tell us so we can better prepare, but all we have right now is that at some point in the future, and I quote, we will “own nothing, and be happy”.
God knows we need to make some serious changes, I’d just like to know a little more about what’s planned, in particular the “owning nothing” part...
Like I said, I don’t know what’s in store for us with this “great reset”, but here’s what I suggest we do in order to best prepare ourselves, and that is taking this opportunity to focus on our own personal reset...
What do I mean?
I mean doing whatever it takes to maintain control over the things we can, in particular and most importantly, our own minds.
Here’s some nuts and bolts on what turned things around for me when I began to feel like I lived in a lunatic asylum.
Meditation.
I’ve done a lot of mediation over the past ten or fifteen years, but I had let it slide.
I started again during the pandemic, but again, when things got too much I let it go when I needed it most. That was a mistake. Mediation is one of the best ways, if not the best way, to clear all of the bullshit out of our heads, to give ourselves some kind of chance of gaining clarity on a situation and being able to see things as they are. I highly, highly recommend it.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Yuval Noah Harari, the bestselling author of three of my favorite books, openly states that there is no way he could have written the Sapiens series without his practice of, not only meditating every day (for two hours no less), but undertaking his annual sixty day, mostly silent, retreat...
Do you need to take a sixty-day meditation retreat?
Not necessarily, but if you started with twenty minutes each day, I think you’d be astounded at the results...
A great place to start is with an app like Headspace.
Social Media.
One of the biggest effects on me during COVID was watching people go at each other on social media. Former friends tearing each other down over differing opinions or beliefs. The gaslighting, the lies, the rewriting of history; the sheer bullshit of it all affected me so much I just had to walk away.
Removing the apps from my phone was a huge first step, so that if I really want to know what was going on a particular platform I would have to wait until I was at my computer...
For me it’s all about taking control of the space between our ears, in my mind, that space has been one of the biggest casualties of this pandemic, and if we don’t get it back, boy are when in trouble when the next crisis comes our way...
To summarize, there’s a lot to unpack about what we just went through.
I’d suggest we take some time to do so, and to do that, we need clear heads and clear minds; hence my two suggestions above.
Then, and only then, we need to figure out how we’re going to share this planet.
COVID has shone a light on how easily we’re divided.
We need to do better in focusing on what unites us, what we have in common, rather than on our differences.
While I’ve focused a lot over the years about what makes a person more resilient, it’s clear to me now that we need to focus more on what makes us more resilient as a group, as a species, and one thing I’m pretty certain of, is that ignoring dissenting voices, silencing or allowing the silencing of those we disagree with, makes us weaker.
Onwards!