I can’t recall what cartoon I was watching in my early days as an American kid, but there was an episode where a set of twins who could foresee the future made a guest appearance. One girl could see all the good things that were about to happen, the other could see all the bad things that were about to happen. They had distinctly opposing personalities – the one who saw all the good things was a depressed Debbie Downer, the one who saw all the bad things was the happiest-go-luckiest girl you’d ever meet. One of the regular characters of the series asked the twins – “If you see all the good things that are going to happen, why are you so unhappy, and if you see all the bad things that are going to happen, why are you so happy?” They told him that the one who saw good things would just expect them to happen, so it was never exciting to see anything good happen, and a shock to see bad things happen. For the other twin, every good thing that happened was totally unexpected and a welcomed surprise, precisely because she could only see all the bad things that were about to happen.

I couldn’t have been more than seven years old when I watched it, but it really stuck out to me. I hadn’t thought of it that way – I would have expected it to be the other way around, where if you see good things, then you tend to be more positive. I didn’t know at the time, but twenty or so years later, this concept would become something really important to me – to always expect life to be terrible, because only then can you truly appreciate the good and see how you can make something good out of this life.

Breaking the Positivity Streak 

I’ve had this blog since 2014 and over the years I’ve thought of just closing it many times –  I don’t post very often, and the domain renewals and wordpress fees cost me an amount of money every year. However, what holds me back is I get a lot of feedback from the Abraham Hicks Workshop Review I wrote in 2015. I’m not trying to make anti-ads or anything, but if I can get one additional person to think about things and question things a bit more, I find it to be worth it. 

One of the things that matters a lot to me is breaking the illusion of “the universe is a good place” and “our ultimate goal should be to be happy” – typical premises that those who follow Abraham Hicks and other new age philosophies profess and hold to be true. Having these axioms as guiding principles seriously damaged my life and wasted years that I cannot get back, and if I can wake one more person up to this truth, well, I’ll keep paying the domain and WordPress fees for it.

Why is it so damaging to believe that life is meant to be good, we’re special, and we’re meant to be happy?

Same as the situation with the twins, despite looking like I was doing great from the outside, these ideas made me overall incredibly, unbelievably unhappy and miserable. It made me falsely believe that whenever something unhappy occurred in my life, something had gone terribly wrong. I’d have to scour my reality and my thoughts to find out what was wrong with myself, where I did wrong, and how I had to “change my thoughts to change my life.” I also was in massive denial about many issues I had in life, with the hope that if I thought positively about things, they would get better. Here’s the spoiler: they didn’t. And the fact: denial makes worse things worse. And the other spoiler: you still have to get yourself out of it at some point, so you might as well get out of it earlier. 

Believing that life will make us happy will lead us down the path to temptations and rob us of the ability to see opportunities where we can create meaning. You can’t create meaning out of things being happy; things only develop meaning when you’ve gone through painful, difficult experiences, adopt the expanded awareness from that experience, become someone who is able to handle them, and make something better going forward for yourself and others. This has nothing to do with being happy as a goal, although many moments along the way do contain the experience of deep joy and happiness. 

The truth that many people don’t want to hear is that life is full of hardships, pain, suffering, and malevolence. Sure, there is a lot of good in the world as well, but thinking that life is comprised of the good moments makes you extremely vulnerable to the difficult times, which are inevitable no matter how much positive believing you do. In my own experience, I told myself to just try adopting a different belief and see what happens – I can always switch back if I needed to. However, once I did this, things started making sense in my life, and I began moving forward, making real progress. That’s when I knew something was up – working with the truth will always make your life work out better, and working with a lie will always make your life falter. 

The other truth is that evil is a real and powerful force. When I wrote the blogpost about the Abraham Hicks Workshop, I believed there was no such thing as evil. There were only people who thought about things incorrectly or had bad self-esteem, or were somehow bullied and became that way – the classic “hurt people hurt people” idea. While that exists and is common, there is also actual evil in this world. There are people who harbor thoughts of performing heinous acts just to see what it’s like, to feel what that kind of dark power feels like.

What’s worse is that those who have evil intentions are counting on enough people not believing in evil to carry out their malevolent plans. When people don’t believe in evil, they don’t see evil when it’s happening, and that’s exactly how evil goes underground, acts undercover, and goes completely unnoticed, until it’s too late. This is the worst part of not believing in evil – you often end up as an unconscious and necessary accomplice to someone’s dark agenda, when you always thought of yourself as a good person who wouldn’t do these kinds of things. 

What happened when I started accepting that life is terrible and evil exists

At first it was a slow realisation that what I was doing from late 2012 onward just was not working. After years of trying to think positively and believing I was going to create my happy life, by late 2017, after multiple job failures, a failed engagement, and being in a stressful job, I was tired out of my last will to work with these ideas. The six years I had bought into and accepted them to be true ended in a lack of any remotely potentially suitable partners, and a management position in a messed up company where everything was hanging by a thread. It was then that I started entertaining potentially different ideas – like what if life isn’t about being happy? What if life is actually terrible by default? What if this universe isn’t a friendly place? What if evil actually does exist? What if some people in my life actually seek to screw me over in a malevolent way? 

The biggest, most immediate positive change is that I began to truly appreciate everything, even the smallest good coming my way. I used to do a lot of appreciation and gratitude logs, which were full of shallow affirmations such as “I’m so grateful for [something I don’t yet have and probably will never have but will make me look awesome and amazing].” However, now that I first started off with the idea that everything goes wrong and life is terrible, suddenly, the fact that my dinner reservation wasn’t cancelled was the best thing that happened, ever. The smallest compliment someone paid me was so uplifting. All the things I used to complain about that weren’t perfect, suddenly did not have to be perfect – I just looked at it as nobody owes me anything, I don’t deserve anything, life is absolutely terrible, so whatever did show up that was mildly good was the most beautiful, fantastic thing that could happen. And a few would happen each day. 

I suddenly felt truly blessed in my life – this one lens shift allowed me to see everything I did have in my life, rather than being acutely aware of everything I didn’t have in my life. I just couldn’t believe how much more grounded I felt after a day or two of telling myself “Ok, life is just terrible by default. We’re constantly fighting the possibility of our liberty being taken away from us, as was the worldwide status quo less than 80 years ago, and it’s just how life operates as a principle.” Six years of struggle was just turned into inner peace from letting go of these ideas. I wondered why it took me so long – in large part it was because these ideologues encourage you to stay on course with the brainwashing (while they sell you more content) until it “becomes your reality,” which sometimes never happens or happens in a twisted way.  

The second part of this was I became much stronger. I began to have the courage to face the situations I was previously scared of, and willingly accept things failing in my life as a default part of life. I started to tell myself “yes life is hard, but maybe something inside me is tough enough to handle it,” and “failing is the default – but you can still keep going.” Comparing that mindset to “if I just stay on track with this vision of mine, it will manifest” while having faulty approaches to life, but thinking that the problem was not “believing” in the vision (illusion) enough. I accomplished more in the first six months of 2018 than I had accomplished between 2012 and 2017. It also formed the crucial foundation of who I had to become to live on my own and build my life ground up in a completely foreign country a year later.

Life can still be beautiful even when it’s terrible

I’ve shared my story about how I turned my life around from changing what I told myself was true about the world. I truly hope that more people come to adopt this idea in a healthy manner (ie, not turning nihilistic, or thinking since life is terrible I can be terrible too) to create more awareness around what truly matters in life, and what we need to collectively do to rebalance the world.

I think the idea behind life being terrible doesn’t mean that life can’t be beautiful, or that you can’t experience happiness. It just means that the default state of life is a lot of suffering and a lot of hardship, and that’s precisely why we need to really value things when they happen to show up. I’m sure you can find many examples in your own life that demonstrate how life is beautiful, maybe especially because of how terrible it is. 

With evil on the rise today it’s more important than ever to be aware of it and know that everything you do truly matters, every choice you make matters and can tip the scales one way or the other. We need to think deeper than just about being happy, we need to also stop trying to control happiness and let it come to us – to catch us in a moment while we’re not watching. It really changed my perspective on life, upgraded my day-to-day attitude and mood, recalibrated a lot of my goals and what I find meaningful, and perhaps not so surprisingly, made me a whole lot happier. 

Catt

PS – if anyone does know the cartoon I’m referring to, let me know so I can properly give them the credit of giving my life back to me in 2018.