for
9/30/2000
Picture a person doing exactly what you are, in exactly the same time. This person has strikingly similar friends, likes places that are carbon copies of your preferred haunts, was raised the same way, eats like you, exercises like you, tolerates heat and cold like you right down to the tips of his toes and lives in the same climate. Now try this: this person is either quite a lot happier than you, or decidedly more depressed.
Think about it. Life can be viewed any number of ways, and we all choose one every moment of ours. The elevator's broken? The air conditioning too? No change for laundry, and nothing to wear tomorrow? Well then, either the world's out to get you, or a series of random events have just occurred that did no physical harm to you or anyone you love.
You come to the Space Toast Page for the straight shit. I may change my opinion week by week, but you can be pretty sure that I believed what I wrote when I wrote it. Or I'm making fun. Or both. You don't have to agree with me, you just have to read it. That's our contract, signed unspoken when you call up the site. And right now, I need to make one point, and I hope you're still reading.
Neither the positive nor the negative way of looking at your life is any more correct.
That's right. There is an unwritten theory, growing in popularity probably in parallel with the ascension of punk to the mainstream and the general lackluster performance of the nineties as far as Y2K-John-Lennon-love-in and electric car shit goes, that to find the truth, we must first go to the absolute worst case scenario and then go up a notch. It's not that bad... it's just really bad. And I challenge it.
People are pack-based animals. We are naturally very conscious of the others around us, and how they're feeling. This is why we make friends. This is why dogs get along with us. This is why a building can have a "feeling" on a particular day. It would be foolish to think that emotions are confined to a single person; we're too interconnected, on our deepest biological levels. It feels good to do good for other people. (Non sequitur? Not quite.)
Now let's go back to that person at the far left who's just like you, but depressed about nothing that's not rolling right off your back. As a pack-based animal, what could this facsimile of you do to make her life sunnier? That's right; focus on others.
I'll now quote Roy Williams, "the Wizard of Ads," directly, simply because all of you should own his book...
"...Depression is insidious because it causes us to become fixated on how we feel, and the resultant self-absorption leads to even greater depression. Go back to the quotes at the beginning of this memo and count how often the speakers refer to themselves; the words 'I,' 'me,' 'myself,' and 'my' occur twenty-seven times in four short statements. The person who asks 'how am I feeling right now?' is plummeting headfirst into a case of the blues, just as certainly as if he had injected it into his arm with a needle. Most people believe they do what they do because of how they feel. In reality, the opposite is true: they feel what they feel because of what they do."
It's obvious what I'm making a case for. Look at life positively, and it will come back around to you. (I'm obviously not right, because this isn't the second-to-worst case scenario, but give it a good shot anyway.)
Above all, remember this: It's not about you, it's about who you love.
Life is long, but it's too short to be wasted.
Touch the Toast