Everything Is F*cked

part of ourselves. We grieve the same way we would grieve the loss of a loved
one, the loss of a job, a house, a community, a spiritual belief, or a friendship.
These  are  all  defining,  fundamental  parts  of  you.  And  when  they  are  torn
away from you, the hope they offered your life is also torn away, leaving you
exposed, once again, to the Uncomfortable Truth.
There are two ways to heal yourself—that is, to replace old, faulty values with
better, healthier values. The first is to reexamine the experiences of your past
and rewrite the narratives around them. Wait, did he punch me because I’m an
awful person; or is he the awful person?
Reexamining  the  narratives  of  our  lives  allows  us  to  have  a  do-over,  to
decide:  you  know,  maybe  I  wasn’t  such  a  great  boat  captain  after  all,  and
that’s  fine.  Often,  with  time,  we  realize  that  what  we  used  to  believe  was
important about the world actually isn’t. Other times, we extend  the  story  to
get  a  clearer  view  of  our  self-worth—oh,  she  left  me  because  some  asshole
left her and she felt ashamed and unworthy around intimacy—and suddenly,
that breakup is easier to swallow.
The other way to change your values is to begin writing the narratives of
your future self, to envision what life would be like if you had certain values
or  possessed  a  certain  identity.  By  visualizing  the  future  we  want  for
ourselves,  we  allow  our  Feeling  Brain  to  try  on  those  values  for  size,  to  see
what they feel like before we make the final purchase. Eventually, once we’ve
done  this  enough,  the  Feeling  Brain  becomes  accustomed  to  the  new  values
and starts to believe them.
This  sort  of  “future  projection”  is  usually  taught  in  the  worst  of  ways.
“Imagine  you’re  fucking  rich  and  own  a  fleet  of  yachts!  Then  it  will  come
true!”
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Sadly, that kind of visualization is not replacing a current unhealthy value
(materialism)  with  a  better  one.  It’s  just  masturbating  to  your  current  value.
Real  change  would  entail  fantasizing  what  not  wanting  yachts  in  the  first
place would feel like.
Fruitful  visualization  should  be  a  little  bit  uncomfortable.  It  should
challenge you and be difficult to fathom. If it’s not, then it means that nothing
is changing.
The Feeling Brain doesn’t know the difference between past, present, and
future;  that’s  the  Thinking  Brain’s  domain.
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 And  one  of  the  strategies  our
Thinking Brain uses to nudge the Feeling Brain into the correct lane of life is
asking  “what  if”  questions:  What  if  you  hated  boats  and  instead  spent  your
time helping disabled kids? What if you didn’t have to prove anything to the
people in your life for them to like you? What if people’s unavailability has
more to do with them than it does with you?
Other  times,  you  can  just  tell  your  Feeling  Brain  stories  that  might  or
might  not  be  true  but  that  feel  true.  Jocko  Willink,  former  Navy  SEAL  and
author, writes in his book Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual  that  he
wakes  up  at  four  thirty  every  morning  because  he  imagines  his  enemy  is
somewhere out there in the world.
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He doesn’t know where, but he assumes
that his enemy wants to kill him. And he realizes that if he’s awake before his
enemy,  that  gives  him  an  advantage.  Willink  developed  this  narrative  for
himself while serving in the Iraq War, where there were actual enemies who
did  want  to  kill  him.  But  he  has  maintained  that  narrative  since  returning  to
civilian life.
Objectively,  the  narrative  Willink  creates  for  himself  makes  no  fucking
sense.  Enemy?  Where?  But  figuratively,  emotionally,  it  is  incredibly
powerful. Willink’s Feeling Brain still buys into it, and it still gets Willink up
every  damn  morning  before  some  of  us  are  done  drinking  from  the  night
before. That is the illusion of self-control.
Without these narratives—without developing a clear vision of the future
we desire, of the values we want to adopt, of the identities we want to shed or
step into—we are forever doomed to repeat the failures of our past pain. The
stories  of  our  past  define  our  identity.  The  stories  of  our  future  define  our
hopes.  And  our  ability  to  step  into  those  narratives  and  live  them,  to  make
them reality, is what gives our lives meaning.