Who do you call when life gets better?

Strange question, I know. When life has been in survival mode for a long period of time a lot social integration revolves around the capacity or availability to manage the rough times. The rough times shape a lot of us into survivors, thrivers or just plain surrenderers. For most, honor lies in the first two. However, for most of us, we identify as survivors or barely above survival. You hear stories of the lottery winners or newly-drafted athletes blow their winnings and earnings on meaningless purchases. Why is that? Survival. Most people are more attuned to survival than thriving.

The rarest occasion in life is being going from a place of survival to thriving. The more common expression is rags to riches. However, psychologically this applies to more than just rags. Survival mode is largely psychological. Someone living in poverty due to meager means is just as pressured as someone who is middle class but is burdened by a high cost of living and productivity schedule they depend on to maintain it.

The great American icon, Sidney Poitier says in the PBS documentary, ONE BRIGHT LIGHT. He refers to poverty as a prison. The constant fear of losing money traps you especially when you have a lot of it all of a sudden. This is the prison a lot of working people find themselves in. They are not poor in terms of lacking the immediate means but they are terrified of being put in a position where they will not be able to fund their livelihoods. This is the poverty mindset that haunts a person in survival mode. You can be in survival mode while on welfare or as a newly minted millionaire. Whose fault is this?

For most people responsibility is about attaining means. You are born to acquire skills so you can earn the funds to live by the means. Once that is established you can explore the joy of life thereafter. People practice developing value for their existence over experiencing the joy of life. A God-given element that increases in cost the older we get. The tragedy is a lot of people succeed in surviving but do not attain an ability to fund their survival where they can feel the joy of just existing. This is where fortune comes in.

What do you when the means show up that exceed the average cost you were working with? What happens when fortune says you now have 10x what you need to feel financially secure about your life? Do you jump into the joy mode or do you hesitate? For most, we celebrate at first. But the next step is where a lot of us fall short. For most of us fortune is not likely so we train ourselves to make the best of what we have. However, fortune says; ” You have more than enough. Now what?” This is where your thinking habits show up. You realize you cannot run from how you think. You cannot buy your way out of it. If you are mentally programmed to manage your means out of the fear of the loss of it, what happens when it is confirmed loss is no longer perilous?

A lot of lottery winners lose all their winnings within a few years. A lot of athletes in American team sports talk regretfully about how much money they blew early on in their careers to frivolity. Most people are acclimated to the state of the fear of losing money that when money shows up, they seek familiar territory. It’s almost as though they seek to lose just enough money to be dropped back into the scenario of almost running out of money. The ostentatious purchases, the under-investigated investments, the impulsive giving to friends and family etc. I think a lot of these decisions are subconscious. I am not immune to this impulse myself. It takes lot of will power to resist this but most of all it takes information and preparation. For most people, their knowledge does not stand a chance against their impulse conditioning.

A lot of people are not conditioned to thrive and even more perilous is the fact that a lot of people are not conditioned to manage the transition from survival to thriving. Constant survival is much more manageable and tolerable psychologically than going from survival to thriving. The mental shift required to survive the transition is not something a lot of families or educational institutions are practiced in instructing. So what do you do when you realize you are making the shift into thriving?

To be continued.

by Julian Michael Yong