I think the most treacherous trip-up in the world to someone looking to improve her/his life is to spend lots of time focusing what they don’t want, don’t like, or fear.*
In writing this, I realized there are three separate issues going on which I want to discuss individually, so this is going to be carried out over three different posts. The three “treacherous aspects” are:
- Focusing on what we hate gets in the way of figuring out what we DO want;
- Hating something requires less energy, focus and effort than the complex discovery process of finding what we love;
- Committing to something we love just because we love it opens us up to scorn as well as peer pressure to conform (i.e. not be original, unique, or creative).
Back to the point, which is why no one should spend any time during an average day fixating on their dislikes: Quite frankly, if you don’t like something, be it a job or a diet or a financial situation, you know you don’t like it, and why. It’s practically instinctive, like my aversion to spiders and call-center jobs. It’s THERE. Outside of sessions of intense self-analysis, it does me no good to focus on that dislike. It just drags me down into the unhappiness of that feeling, making it more prominent than any good thing I might create for myself. Going on and on and on about how much I hate call-center jobs won’t land me the job of my dreams, it just makes me bitter about call-center jobs I have worked.
Which is a nice segue (see what I did there?!) into point number one: Focusing on what we hate gets in the way of figuring out what we DO want. Discovering who we are and what makes us tick is not exactly easy, because it requires taking risks – dangerous living, as I call it. It means walking out of the “known”.
We know what we hate because, generally, we’ve had the opportunity to hate it intimately. I’m not talking about abstract issues like genocide or racism or a fear of world-wide economic collapse, but rather things that affect us personally and directly: jobs, people, and situations we hate because we know for a fact they make us miserable. I don’t like spiders because I’ve suffered multiple spider bits in my life; and I loathe call-center jobs because I have had my soul crushed by them more than a few times over.
On the other hand, finding what we love involves opening ourselves to the unknown. Clinging to what we hate is so much simpler, and carries the illusion of being “safe”. It’s not, and in fact it is crippling, which is why I call fixating on something you hate to be a treacherous act. It feels righteous, but it is really just narrowing the world down to things that are familiar. We use our list of “hates” as shields to protect us from risk.
I preached the mantra “I hate the beach!” for years, convincing myself it was true and denying myself many a fun trip to the ocean with friends because, you know, “I hate the beach!” In truth, what I hated was the idea of me baring any part of my body to the scrutiny of others. What I hated was how ashamed I was to be seen in a bathing suit. Quite frankly it had almost nothing to do with the beach itself (I’m not fond of sand, but who is?). What I do like – hanging out with friends, splashing about in the water, etc. – was inconsequential compared to the fact that “I hate the beach!”
Ask anyone to make a list of things they hate, and they’ll jump to answer. Flip it around to ask for a list of things they truly love, and it will give most people pause. It for sure will be a much shorter list, anyway. My goal is to get to the point where my list of things I love and love to do is twice as long as my (very substantial) list of things I hate.
Next up: Expanding horizons! Oh the terror!
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*I want to say to those who argue that I should spend time thinking about my dislikes and my fears for the sake of analyzing them and understanding them: bullshit. That is something I do with my therapist, which is important, but not a daily part of planning my life’s goals.
