Illusion of progress

Up the down escalator

It is a scientific fact that the natural flow of things is downward, from order to chaos - that's entropy.

If it often feels like the world is working against you, well, that's because it is. Everything we do requires more effort than it seems it should do.

We are constantly fighting unwanted changes in our lives and around us, fighting to hold attention, to figure out what we want, to keep up with news, friends, trends, getting dinner ready, to get more sleep. We fight for more time in the day or to at least slow things down enough to enjoy some of that time. Hell we fight gravity just to get out of bed in the morning!

This is why even though we are trying to do things, to improve, to fight forward... we appear to be standing still. When we DO actually take a breather and effectively "do nothing", we even seem to go backwards a bit!

Life is lived forwards and understood backwards, but that forwards direction is always against the flow. It may seem unnatural, going against the flow, but is the very thing that makes life possible, the necessary friction as it were. We are swimming upstream against the flow of water, we are running full pelt up the down-escalator, just to appear to be casually walking up it.

It is exhausting.

This has only gotten harder in the past decade as the lens of social media, invites us to validate our efforts, achievements and lifestyle against hundreds or potentially thousands of examples of what appear to be happy, successful people doing things far more glamourous or interesting than we currently are.

It is the invisible chain we all wear around our necks, so do what you can to see that chain. See it on your friends and family, your coworkers, the people you strike up conversations with on the commute and those you avoid! Treat everyone like they are putting a brave face on things and most importantly... give YOURSELF a break!

Perspective

The reason we tend toward negative thoughts so much is that downward trajectories such as negativity, chaos and destruction are easy. When you think about it, they are pretty much automatic and default.

Inaction or lack of intervention will, for the most part, lead to regression and negative outcomes and we can only do so much!

Taking a break when we most need to dig in and push through is appealing and necessary for normal function and when we lack confidence or enter a freeze state it gets worse and we want to just let go completely.

The effort to counterbalance this experience seems wildly disproportionate. It's infinitely harder to summon the same amount of positivity for sustained periods when we are already feeling ao negative... It's a terrible catch 22 scenario.

The other option than counterbalancing in this way, is "course correcting".

?? This is less extreme, but yields less obvious and immediate results so you have to trust the process and go at it for longer. It's more about trending water than improving though so a coping mechanism