Now Is a Good Time to Live Your Life

No one can say this period in history is boring. On the other hand, most might say that these times are unsettling and scary.

Israel is at war with Iran. Gaza is still unsettled. China is trying to dominate the world. The conflict rages on in Ukraine. At home, Americans are still mired in a tribal battle with no end in sight. The left continues its attacks on the president, interest rates are high, and there is a growing gap between the rich and the poor. The levels of depression, anxiety, and suicide are high, serving as indicators of social illness in our society.

Social media raises the angst level among the public because it’s a conflict amplifier, spewing out hate from one side toward the other. The weight of conflict and uncertainty is debilitating to the human psyche, and it makes people feel that everything is out of control.

There is a solution all of us can utilize to put the external world into a box. That solution is to live your life.

If you have a home, a family, a job, and friends, those things define your internal world. You influence or are influenced substantially by all aspects of that world. By comparison, you have little influence over the external world. We have virtually no influence over the government except during the election cycle. The federal government influences us mainly through its management of the economy. If they fumble the economy, we feel the pain.

If you go to bed tonight after watching the news, you’ll wake up, and the world will be the same. Its changing events are external to your life. At the same time, your internal world resumes its dependence on you, so you have to respond to its demands. You have built your internal life, and the external world is an abstraction.

I suggest that a solution to dealing with our two worlds is to rebalance in favor of your internal world. In other words, you need to reduce your exposure to the external world.

Steps to “living your life” and focusing on your internal world include the following:

• Get off social media – it’s not reality, and it describes a world that doesn’t exist. Much of the content is designed to produce clicks and waste your time. Social media is the primary outlet of rage between ideologues. Why let them exploit your mood and emotions? An alternative plan would be to unfollow or block the ideologues. Choose people who are rational and objective as your sources of information.

• Use your phone less - the average person looks at their phone 144 times per day, or every 10 minutes. Don’t have your phone in your hand all the time. Go to it to check messages and return calls. Block spam and robocalls. Other than emergencies, all content that appears on your phone doesn’t need an immediate response.

• Decrease your screen time – Phone, tablet, computer, TV. Screen time is a human activity avoidance. Have an occasional “No TV” night.”

• Talk to people in person every day – that’s what human beings are designed to do. The human-to-human connection is comforting and satisfying. Conversation with AIs is not natural human interaction because it’s empty of emotion. Isolation from people is debilitating and psychologically damaging (recall the COVID lockdowns).

• Do something with your hands – use tools, draw, play sports, exercise. These activities promote the mind-body connection, connecting the brain to the muscles. Human health depends on keeping the mind-body connection strong.

• Think about your internal life – planning, interacting, thinking of changes that might be beneficial. If you are in a rut, break out. Add a new activity. Subtract one habit that is no longer beneficial.

• Focus your Political Anger – Most Americans are unhappy with the federal government. The problem is bipartisan because each party, when they are in control, ignores the needs of the American people in favor of the elites. The only way to fix this problem is to replace the do-nothing incumbents with people who will be responsible to the public. The public must utilize their strongest tool to reshape the government and replace the incumbents in the next primary election.

The common reason for living your life occurs in sports. Most people have a favorite sport and team. If your team is good, you pay close attention. If your team is bad, you’re unhappy, but you go on and live your life, hoping for a better team next year.

The health of any society depends on its people focusing the majority of their time on their internal lives and limiting their exposure to the external world, which is beyond their control.

For that reason, we need to rebalance our thinking today.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.