Transcription
Listen to me. If you have lived through some horrible suffering or injustice and you survived, just realize you are now in possession of one of the greatest of all treasures. Contrast bias. You now have the ability to be truly happy because you know how bad it can be.
Someone who lives a sheltered life will never know any of that. They do not know what it is to be happy because they don't know what it is to suffer. And when you do that, then all of a sudden the lemons turn into lemonade. All the suffering, all the trauma, all the unfairness of your upbringing now becomes a pro, not a con.
And you've got two choices in this life. I think it was Einstein or a great physicist who said, you know, mankind has two great choices: to decide whether the universe is a friendly place or a hostile place. This is kind of my non-physicist version of that. Like, you can now look at the past. I mean, time is probably an illusion. Most of the smartest, say 50 to 60% of the smartest scientists alive don't even believe that time exists as we know it. They've got the block theory of time, maybe everything's happening at once. But us humans have these little brains, and so we perceive our past. This bad thing happened to us, and now we're moving forward, or trying to, or now we're suffering. No, forget all that. Perceive your past trauma and suffering as something you have now turned into great, a great good.
You now know what it is to be happy. Only the person who truly has faced hell and death knows what it is to be alive. Somebody you take who got cancer, was told they would be dead in six months, miraculously persevered, fought through, and survived. Oh, that person's truly alive. That person's truly alive. And as they walk through, they see all the people just taking for granted their health, their happiness, and thinking they don't even know what they're missing.
My mom used to tell me, she said, "Ty, the youth is wasted on the young." And she, I didn't, when I was little, I didn't know what she meant. Now I realize my mom was saying young people don't know what they have because they've never been old. The greatest gift that could happen to any of us would be like Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt movie. You start out old and then you become young, and then you're like, "Woo, every day is getting better!" Because you remember what it was like to be 80 and have arthritis, and now all of a sudden they're 30 and you can run and you can jog. But yet, the whole world wastes their talents.
You see, I was, I saw, uh, some documentary, some video, and and I know a guy. He's like 6'5", you know, he's got great genetics. This is like what every dude wishes they were. Tall. He's not a bad-looking guy, but he's lazy. He eats bad. He wastes the gift that he has in life, right? Because he always had it good. That's why the high school popular kid usually fails in life. They never had any suffering. They were always popular, so they just tried to cruise through life and got the first job and married the first person. It was too easy.
So you have to recreate the narrative that you live by. And most people's narrative is, especially now, is everybody whining about their past and their trauma and their suffering and continually going to therapy. And look, there's nothing wrong with therapy, but you can overdo anything. You know, it's like there's nothing wrong with yoga, but if you're doing yoga nonstop eight hours a day, it's probably out of balance. And so now people are moving through their trauma and continually healing. I'm like, "When are you ever going to heal?" You mean 90? You, I'm still healing from what happened to me at 9. We're all suffering out here.
But as the saying goes, there's two types of people: one perceives the universe as friendly, and one perceives it as hostile. And what's bad about social media is, in general, the hostile universe is what goes viral. In videos, if you look, go look with a critical eye through social media, and you'll notice besides like goofy, funny videos, what goes viral on Twitter X? And it was like conspiracy theories about how the world is kind of an evil place, and it's them against you. And like, that's a fundamental question the physicist asked.
Have you decided to see the lemons as lemons or the lemons at lemonade? Let's say there is a conspiracy on the right, on the left, on the Illuminati, on whatever it is, on the them, the them, the them. You have a choice. Do you perceive that as you're in an eternal battle? And an eternal, you want to be in an eternal battle? All people want to be in an eternal battle. You ever been to war? You ever seen people getting shot? You don't want to be in an eternal war, trust me. My first childhood memory, growing up in Long Beach, my mom, five, four or five, one of my first memories, somebody getting shot in the heart, right in front of me, and my, a wedding night, and bl, robbed my uncle. I've seen like, I was always happy to not be around that anymore when I got older.
So, I mean, that's the problem with watching the news. Is that the perspective that the universe, everything's unfriendly. That's what the news is. They're feeding you unfriendly. Oh, you know what's happening here? These two countries, well, this genocide, this. And there's nothing wrong. By the way, I'm not saying being an over-optimist and just walk with your head in the clouds and ignore the suffering and pain of others. No, I'm saying we have no choice. There is pain and suffering in the world. But if you see it, as I said in the beginning of this, as I'm now in possession of contrast bias, I now know how bad it is, so I can be truly alive today when that's stopped.
But some people go, "No, my life sucks. I wish I had not had that happen. I wish I had been like them." But if they're sheltered, they don't even know they're happy. Rich kids ain't happy. They don't know they're rich. You have to have been poor to know you were rich. The only benefit of being rich is to have been poor at one time. Because by being poor, you're now in possession of the greatest of all treasures. That is the contrast bias. You know how to appreciate having money because you're no longer broke. And the rich kid born in Beverly Hills doesn't know that. That's why half of them sadly end up in rehab. "Oh, life's too tough. Going to take drugs to escape the pain."
And all people, I didn't grow up in Beverly Hills. I was born in the ghetto. My dad was in Terminal Island. My dad's from, uh, my dad had it tougher than me too. But my dad was a pretty happy guy because everything was uphill after he came through, and he was like, "By, I remember he lived when he got out of prison, Terminal Island, he lived in Beach." She's like, "I love this place. I walk on the beach." And it wasn't even a nice beach, but to my dad, coming from, you know, Manhattan, Harlem, no grass, no, I mean, Central Park, but dirty, no real beach. Like even a dirty beach at LA made my dad happy. That's the simple things.
So reframe your narrative, ladies and gentlemen. That's the only way. By the way, if you have a better way, letting me know. This culmination of what I've learned in life, it might sound insignificant. And maybe you already know it. Great. You're already in possession. But not everybody is. So everything has to be reframed, or else you ain't going to make it through this life. And I can tell you this, the universe out there is, uh, it's easy to perceive it as a darkest and cold place. And so it's better to live delusionally that it's a friendly place, in my opinion, than to go down that dark road. Don't let the mind go through there. Spin things, baby. Spin it. Spin it into something else. Whatever happened to do, spin it. Like, if you're still alive, you have hope. So I don't care what's happening to you right now. Spin it into something better. Spin it into some narrative of the friendliness of this universe towards you. You'll thank me one day.
If you like these, I'm recording these rants, people call them, every once in a while. So if they offered some value, subscribe, follow. Talk to you. Z.