Life is electric, bro

And so are you.

You may have seen the quote below as it does the rounds online. It has now been memeified. I see it often.

Life is fucking electric bro. Don’t fall for the doomer shit. That’s for losers and normies scared of their own shadows. Walk around like God sent you and smile at everyone you see. Spread light and abundance. Build things and take chances. This is the best time in history.

It espouses a positive, optimistic take on today. In among the decline and the insanity someone thinks life might turn out alright.

He is correct. Despite appearances, this is indeed the best time to be alive.

A good life is much less about externals and much more about how we view the world and our place in it. It is about us and our attitude and approach to life.

Electric Dude has a point. Several in fact.

Avoid pessimism

Don’t fall for the doomer shit. That’s for losers and normies scared of their own shadows.

Lots of doom and gloom circulates. Pessimism is the default. It seems to be endemic.

We are in decline. The economy can never recover. The planet is going to explode. So will our sun in a few billion years. And who can forget the eventual heat death of the universe?

What is the point of it all?

Nihilism is attractive because it reinforces every mental escape route we can conjure up, including capitulation, simply not trying to improve our lot. A fancy version of learned helplessness.

Embracing a bleak outlook is strangely comforting and lets us off the hook, but it blinds us to life’s many bounties.

The main source of pessimism today is comparing real life to fiction. The most widespread fictions are utopian ideas to govern society. Net Zero; full equality between groups; the eradication of poverty, disease or struggle. All are fantasies conjured up by the comfortable.

The Liberalism that has dominated the West for over a century is primarily about thinking up some imagined solution, sometimes to imagined problems, then becoming outraged it doesn’t exist.

This hobby is based on mental models, little fantasies inside people’s heads. Some are invented by the individuals who hold them, others are implanted by mainstream culture via media and peer pressure.

People drawn to such mental models famously become trapped inside their heads, attending to their schemes. Real life is continually compared to these fantasy models and found wanting.

And the things these fantasies are compared with, the grubby reality we actually live in with its unemployment, economic uncertainty and unpredictable weather, is the norm. It is our expectations that are fake.

The pessimism this induces is then equally fake. It is a consequence of the prominence of bad ideas.

The solution is to ignore the utopian nonsense and focus on real life with all its ups and downs.

On a mission from God

Walk around like God sent you. Smile at everyone you see and spread light and abundance.

There is good reason for optimism, and even more reason to smile.

God did send you. Perhaps you reject notions of God and prefer something more scientific? What about mathematics? The chances of you existing are so small they are statistically absurd.

By rights none of us should exist. All it would take is your mother being hit by a bus ten minutes before she met your father and boom, you cannot exist at all.

We are all miracles or unlikely happenings. It is important we act like it.

Our statistical unlikelihood alone should give us all reason to smile. But few do, not nowadays.

It is more than the doom loops and the constant bad news. We walk around wearing headphones, playing with our always-present devices. We don’t even notice the world around us, so we take it for granted.

In a very real sense more and more people shut themselves off from life happening to them.

Smiling really implies interacting with other people. Talking, saying hello; human connection.

While many self-isolate with their noise-cancelling technology we sense all of us are desperate for social contact. A strange paradox as self-reported social anxiety is on the rise as are these common signs of antisocial behaviour.

The more people put it off the harder it gets. And yet a smile from a stranger can change our day and cheer us up instantly.

Amazingly we can be the instigators of this process when we do the smiling ourselves. The most powerful way to improve our lives is always to act, to do and to not wait for it to happen.

Give and you shall receive is an old observation even if it seems counterintuitive. It alludes to the investment model that underpins most behaviour. We invest some effort before it pays a dividend. You do something then you get the reward.

That works with altruistic behaviour, which is why it feels good. It seems to be wired into our brains.

Success too is often based on delivering value. It is how many of us survive in the world.

But genuine giving without the expectation of anything in return is a hidden gem of an experience most of us overlook and experience only rarely, almost as an accident.

Maybe it is giving to charity, a somewhat impersonal version.

But every now and then life provides chances to do a good deed or to be a good Samaritan, even if just for a moment. We should be on the lookout for these. They are little joyous gifts from the universe, like dopamine hits from God.

This is quite literally spreading abundance. We share some part of ourselves with no expectation of anything in return and it feels instantly good.

Production, not consumption

Build things and take chances.

Life is fleeting. No risk, no glory. We all know this, yet we shy away.

Taking chances is invigorating; it is not just about success. It is about living a full life. Do or do not.

As we age we tend to regret the things we didn’t do. The chances we didn’t take. We care much less about the failed attempts, even when accompanied by considerable losses which are often survivable.

The lesson is clear. Do something, take a shot at it, because regret is crushing. It is much worse than failure which at least provides lessons to improve in future. Not doing, never trying, is far harder, especially as we age.

This fate is avoidable. All it takes is acting now on those ideas you may have at the back of your mind, or even at its forefront.

Do it now, take your chance and build something important to you. You get to decide what; start a family, start a business, write a book. Anything counts.

The sensation of producing something far exceeds the fleeting enjoyment of consumption every time.

The temptation to consume is everywhere, from our phones to social media to unhealthy food. It is easy as it is often passive; watching TV, scrolling through feeds, endless short videos based on past choices, microwave dinners and never taking the stairs. Convenience is our enemy.

The opposite, to produce, to build, is difficult, time consuming and fraught with risk. It takes a long time to become good at anything worthwhile, and the path is lonely and frustrating.

And yet constructing, building and making is like no other feeling. The act of creation is a divine spark within us. To not attempt this, and succumb to mere passive consumption, is to waste this precious gift.

You are alive now

This is the best time in history.

Many look at the collapsing world around us and could not comprehend the truth of this statement. But now is when you exist.

It is not only the best time to exist but the only time you can exist. You cannot exist a century ago or a century hence. Your life is now and can only be now. This is it.

You are living through this glorious clown show, like it or not, so you might as well make the most of it.

Would you have it any other way? Those who would tend to overlook what life right now provides us and they would be equally careless if it were the twenty-fourth century and they had flying cars and holidays to the Moon.

We get jaded quickly, especially in Western nations. We have grown fat and complacent thanks to the hard work of our ancestors who laid the foundations for our amazing countries.

We forget the past was a compendium of early death, plagues and horrors beyond comprehension, all of it painstakingly overcome through our recent ancestors’ determination, money and grit.

Now isn’t so bad thanks to them. In fact for most it is good. Many of us live much better than our grandparents. It has opportunities closed to our ancestors. We have all the world’s books and movies on demand. Virtually every song is now downloadable.

We have rich lives and to be bored with them is an odd thing. And yet boredom pervades everything.

It does so because many lack gratitude and self-awareness; they have zero knowledge of recent history and its difficulties. Some even imagine the creators of Western nations to have been privileged despite the unimaginable hardships they endured during their lifetimes.

The quote understands this and swipes it away. We’ve never had it so good and some of us understand that.

Life is good

Things are actually incredible. Opportunities abound.

These only become apparent when we free ourselves from fantasy. This is what damns those obsessed with politics. Their mental models dominate. Their utopian ideas become more real than reality.

Theirs is a pessimistic outlook because today always falls short when compared to tomorrow’s promise. It doesn’t really matter if it is a Left or Right vision. All visions look past now and imagine something grander.

The alternative to this is not to fight them but to do what many increasingly cannot do. Attend to reality.

This is today’s real battle. Anchoring oneself to real life, warts and all. Getting your head out of your phone, your news feed or your mental model. Looking afresh at the world we actually inhabit and to do so directly without a screen, a theory to distort what you see, or some other mediating factor.

The nihilism and the doom we are continually subjected to are the projected mental states of the degenerates running Western nations, many of them lost within an intellectual prison of their own making. They cannot stand reality with its dirt and poverty and inefficiencies that make us who we are. So they revert to their pristine fantasies where everything can be perfect. As they spend ever more time there we and the world around us disappoints them.

We must not allow this jaundiced view of life to dominate any longer. We challenge it by living well ourselves. We create and build, we make the most of life as it is. We refuse to succumb to the negativity.

The enemies of humanity are killing themselves; we must leave them to do so. The future we want will be built by those living in reality. It must recognize how great life can be. We must not be swayed by the nihilists and their broken view of life.

Above all we must embrace the only life we will ever get and with a bit of effort we can make it electric.

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