Re: Why Blaming Your Circumstances Makes You A Loser

Last time I talked about blaming your circumstances makes you give up control of your life; making you powerless. And that you need a mind shift here and take that control back.

To that I got a reader’s reply I’d like to pick up for today’s email. I think we can all learn from this.

To paraphrase the response it was like “bad things happen to people beyond their control. It’s not their fault, why do I call them a loser?”

Let’s start backward with this. I used the word loser once, in the subject line of my email and nowhere else. A clickbaity move that did not work at all. But surprisingly this word struck with this reader.

Why?

Perception.

Remember when I talked that we all are living in our own bubbles of reality. That they are created by our thoughts and emotions and experiences. We can all read the same subject line and email, but we all will read it differently.

Sometimes complete differently than the person wrote it.

That is normal. We all do that. The thing is, you need to be aware of these bubbles and actively counter your own biases. Otherwise, a lot of misunderstandings and worse are waiting for you.

Think for a moment about how you perceived my email. What reaction did you have? Where you upset too? Ask yourself why.

Doing so helps you to learn more about yourself.

The next thing I’d like to talk about is the fault part.

I mentioned it before. Fault and also guilt do not help you as a concept. Too many people use them to create misery for themselves. Getting stuck in something they did 3 decades ago and believing this did ruin their life… With often trivial things.

When you made a mistake, fix it, learn from it, and move on. Sure, sometimes you can’t fix it for many reasons. But honestly, most of our issues are not on murderer.level, so can fix.

Also, the longer you wait for fixing it, the harder it gets.

So, with that out of the way - hopefully - let’s tackle the first part.

How much control do you have of the things happening in your life?

From my bubble POV, it is more than we think. And we especially have the power to react to them. Which is even more important than the “bad thing” itself.

See, not all those bad things are out of our control. If a meteor is falling on earth in a month, it’s nothing we caused. That’s really something happening from outside of our control. But we still have plenty of options, how we react to it now.

We can blame the meteor for ruining our life. We can celebrate doomsday and party into oblivion. Or we could look for ways to survive this.

But hey, that’s not the norm of our situations and problems.

Let’s make that more relateable and use COVID as an example. I believe we can classify that as “bad things”.

Sure, that this virus came up is probably not caused by any of us. But besides that, much of the rest is influenced by us. Your own thoughts and actions created your particular situation.

If you licked door handles or toilet seats for a challenge, you increased your risk of getting COVID. The same goes if you go against all recommendations of your government; whichever that is.

And it’s no different for the financial situation many are facing now. I know I have an unpopular opinion here. But your and my situations are caused by our previous actions and thoughts. And you neglected a lot of things.

And whatever led you here will not bring you further. And if you want to get a better life, you need to change something. And it all starts with you.

See, when you start the blaming game now, you will hit the road to disaster. You’ll start to blame the virus, your employer, your politics, the ruthless corporations, the economics, the people until long you blame the whole world. Almost, because when you are on that road, you blame all others except for yourself.

Do you think that will help you in creating a better life?

Do you think blaming others for your life will make it any better?