Careful what you watch for

There seems to be a lot of negativity out there. But not for me. I’m kind of an optimist, and find the good in the middle of bad.

For example, when I blew a tire, which pulled me off the road, I was thankful I didn’t roll into the ditch. While changing the tire, it occurred to me to thank God this didn’t happen on the 401 in heavy traffic. See? Bad thing, which could have been worse.

Sure, I’ve had some bad things which were seriously bad things. No bright side there. But that’s not a world I live in.

My late brother was something of a pessimist. He said: “The definition of an optimist is someone who puts on his seat belt before starting the car.” This comes from a longstanding Campbell tradition of driving vehicles in constant state of repair. In other words, wait until it starts, if it does, then buckle up.

I choose to live in a happy world. I wasn’t always this way. Hell, I went through the struggle of starting a business, and the pain and anguish which comes with that. But, ‘round about 30, I realized that all of my worry and angst meant nothing in the long run. Getting a magazine to press meant more to me than to the rest of the world. Only I worried and stewed about it. Made no difference in the long run.

After a long while, I learned to roll with the flow—good times, bad times. When one print job went bad, my goal was to fix it, not agonize about it. My client said: “Doesn’t anything bother you?” It was then I realized problems were to be fixed. Most people search for someone to blame. I don’t care. Just fix it.

SO THAT’S ME
How about you? I think a lot of people learned the same lesson: Don’t worry about things you can’t fix, just fix it if you can. Easy to say, in a world which changes every day.

If you watch the news every day, and check in with Facebook religiously, and go on the internet for breaking ‘news’ … you are bound to be depressed. Your negativity vibe is running at high speed.

You may think I’m crazy, but I found a solution: Stop watching the news.

I hit my Trump limit because, what’s the point? I checked in a month later and—nothing had changed in the meantime. If I watched all the time, I would be worried and upset all the time. Following the antics of a crazy person was making me crazy. And to what purpose? There’s no ‘just fix it’ in the equation. It’s a carnival ride I don’t care to buy a ticket for.

The sad part is, we fall into the soap opera drama of it all, to our everyday pain and negativity. Just like …

LOVE ISLAND
Living proof I don’t think like ordinary humans, I offer you Love Island, the TV show in which beautiful cerebrally vacant bimbos try to hook up with beautiful, brainless, insensitive hunky men who join together to find love and end up with misery. [It was so successful, it has a spin-off!]

This reminds me of the Great Depression [no, I was not there] when people loved romantic movies with great dance numbers, and a satisfying romantic ending. Popular, of course, because people could shake off their misery, and lose themselves in a dream world.

In times like this, we crave the opposite. We are welloff, and we love shows in which the actors are more miserable than us. Which tends to make our rough life more tolerable.

This is the kind of panacea we crave, when everything else is going nuts.

Love Island gives us something to swear at, and engage with. “Oh, brainless Laura, how could you fall for brainless Hank? You are both so shallow, you are perfect for each other! You might not even know you’re married, seeing as you have nothing in common and nothing to talk about. That’s like the perfect marriage!”

It’s an escape from reality, and we all have our ways of doing it.

I’M A WINNER!
We are talking about how people escape from reality, and enter a dream world. Nothing says more about a society in a state of depression than the Lottery: The hope of becoming stinking rich by doing nothing but choosing random numbers.

Brother Rick [keep in mind he was a pessimist] called the Lottery a ‘tax on the poor’. As a mathematician, he calculated the odds, and determined the odds of hitting the lottery were less than the odds of being hit by lightning.

Still, we’ve all been in shops in which people buy multiple tickets on various lotteries. “Give me a 649, Scratch 500, two Megaball Millions, etc.” [Sorry, I don’t know the actual terminology.]

This is hope. An unreachable, almost impossible, hope of winning, but ends up with millions of people losing. Every week.

TV commercials touting on-line computer games abound, offering great fun with a great group of people, where ‘everybody wins!’ Almost. You can now lose money using your own cellphone! Now that’s progress.

I like blackjack, but I will only play against a human dealer. Once, in Mexico, I had time on my hands and played a blackjack machine. I lost $50 (US!) in 10 minutes. It seemed off to me that, if I had 18, the machine dealer had 20. This carried on for 10 minutes, with the robot dealer beating me by one card each time. Coincidence? No, amigo.

People who are driven to internet gambling not only have a serious problem, but forget that we are in the age of AI, which makes my suspicious Mexican machine look like a Commodore 64. This is why the TV ads have teeny-tiny type at the bottom recommending responsible gambling—as if there is such a thing.

The point here is that a society in confusion and disappointment will go to any lengths to gain hope, and possibly a truckload of toonies pulling up to their front door.

DON’T LET IT BRING YOU DOWN
Turning off the negative influences on your life can free your mind (and save $ from your wallet). Do some people win, by some crazy chance? Sure. A handful of the millions of people who play the Lottery, or send it to some digital money farm somewhere, are rolling in cash. The rest of us are often tossing money into the wind. Luck is luck, but you can’t really count on it.

I like luck. I use it every day. But I don’t rely on it. What I do determines whether I win or lose, and I do both on a regular basis.

Sometimes our modern communication does us more harm than good … watching everything everywhere all the time. Take a rest.

countymag@bellnet.ca