I'm Not a Positive Person. I'm a Balanced One.
I'm not a positive person, and I'm not a negative person either. I'm a balanced person. To me, this is a really helpful point of view to have, because some of you say, "Oh, Jerry, you're so positive," and I think it depends on the context. It's important to intelligently apply the use of positive and negative. If you ask me about the healthcare system, I'm really negative and toxic about it. It's a sick care system. It's horrible. If you ask me about crypto, I'm really toxic and hateful on most of crypto, because crypto is designed to rip fools off. Almost everything I see in it is somebody's money-making scheme designed to separate naive people from their money. It's pitched as a get-rich-quick thing, but it's terrible.
So I'm grateful to accept and see the balance I have in myself. What I find frustrating in the world is that so often people say, "Oh yeah, just be positive, it's all good." No, it's not. Life sucks sometimes. Life is miserable and hard sometimes, and it leaves you questioning everything. Life is not this beautiful thing of flowers and rainbows all the time. And if it was, you'd get sick of it and destroy it anyway. I've heard it said that we created a universe before where everything was all good, where we were all blissed out on our connectedness and God consciousness all the time, and it was boring. There was no reason to do anything. There was no momentum or purpose to guide our lives. Ironically, what I find powerful is the balance, the polarity of positive and negative. The exciting thing is the balance between the negative side of the battery and the positive side of the battery.
The Problem With Boxing Yourself In
The trouble starts when you try to box yourself into being "this positive person" or "this negative person." Then you don't want to do certain things. It's like, "Positive people don't play Warzone or first-person shooter games." Why can't I play a first-person shooter game if I want to? Nobody is really 100% positive all the time anyway. What's wrong with constant positivity is that it can turn into obedience to authority. There are times to be extremely negative, to fight, and to resist. Now, of course, a lot of people do this at the wrong time. They protest meaningless, stupid things they have no ability to change, and meanwhile the things they actually could do something about go ignored.
So what I try to do is intelligently apply the positive and negative in my life. For example, I'm very positive about my marriage and very positive about my kids, but I probably lay more criticism on my kids than anybody else does, because the people who know you best are in the best position to criticize. That said, I generally don't criticize them much. I'm not going to claim that all I do is tell my kids I love them, even though that is most of what I tell them. Ideally you want to be mostly positive, but it depends on the context. It's not just about always telling everybody they're right. When I drank and was poisoning myself all the time, the right thing to say was not, "Oh, you're doing great, Jerry, just keep going, it'll be all right." No. I was poisoning myself to death and I needed to stop, and I needed to quit being an insane, selfish person. That's the thing to tell me, not "just be positive, keep going, bro." There's a time to be negative and a time to be positive, and you need to pick that out intelligently and consciously.
With crypto, we need a lot more negativity toward all these garbage coins. Almost every coin out there is a garbage coin, a fraud, a liar, a cheater, a stealer coin. And we need some more positivity toward ICP, because that's real technology. That's what I do. I apply what's needed. I'm very reactive. In fact, I've usually voted reactively. Whatever most people were for, whoever won the election, I generally voted against them for most of my life, because what I'm all about is balance.
Balance Is Where the Power Is
To me, balance is where you have power, like in a battery. Do you want a battery that's all positive? No. Balance is where the power lives. A battery works by having a positive pole and a negative pole, and without both poles the battery doesn't work. In life, we need balance the same way.
I saw a man in his 90s in my AA meeting today who can barely do anything, and I found myself wondering, why are you here, what are you doing, what is your life purpose? I'm not saying you should quit and give up. I'm saying that at that point you should be very clear about why you are here and what you're doing, because you have very limited functionality and probably very limited time left. You should be very aware of what else you have to do. I'm very aware of what I'm doing here. I'm having fun, I'm enjoying the experience, and I'm trying to wake other people up and help others learn and grow. That's why I'm here, and I think it's very valuable to always be aware of your purpose.
Now, sometimes you may not know your purpose, and a lot of the time we really need other people to help us fulfill it. Life is pretty meaningless if you're just trying to do everything by yourself. I believe that's why so many people are depressed. They go around trying to be positive, saying "Yeah, it's all good," but it doesn't feel all good, because all they're doing is suppressing. They hate how things are going in their life, but they keep telling everyone they're doing great. It's also genuinely challenging because a lot of the time you don't have the time. People ask, "How are you doing?" Well, how much time have you got? Five minutes? Fine, I'll just say I'm good. I don't have enough time to go into the details of life.
But one thing I do that's really effective is that when I'm feeling like garbage, I say it. My grandfather would ask, "How are you doing, Gerald?" and I'd say, "I'm piss poor." That could be a bit of an exaggeration sometimes, but I think it's important to lean into the balance in life. You don't want to be a one-sided person who thinks one way and acts one way, because you're killing yourself doing that. You're draining the battery.
Why I Explore the Negative Side
So I'm not here being positive all the time. Life absolutely is horrible, miserable suffering in some cases. However, I tend to focus on the joy and the positive in my life. And I think there's even a place for the rest of it. Why am I out here playing Warzone solos? Part of me wants to suffer, wants to put myself in a kill-or-be-killed environment, me against the world. Part of me must really want that, because that's what I'm doing. And it seems like there's a place for that in life too. Some of the teachings you hear say, "Just be positive, it's all good all the time, never engage with negativity." I think that's extremely limiting, because there's a lot to learn, and sometimes you learn the most from getting into the negative situations.
I'm not saying you should put yourself in situations to be exploited or taken advantage of. I'm saying you really learn when you explore, and sometimes when you explore you find things that are rough and scary, and that's okay. I've been playing tennis, and the outside of my right knee started to hurt a little. I could have just sat in the house and not risked hurting my knee. But there's more to life than trying to be in perfect health. If you don't use your health, if you don't explore, then what good is having it? If all your actions are taken out of fear, you end up afraid to do anything because you don't want to get hurt. I struggle with that, because I don't want to have to deal with going to the hospital, so sometimes I think, let me just be super cautious, I don't even want to take a chance at getting hurt. But the thing is, you've got to be open to the negative experiences too. I'd prefer in most cases not to have the negatives, but there's value to everything.
Where it can really help you is realizing that some of the negative experiences in life are your chances to help each other. How am I going to help you by saying it's all good? That's not helpful. I can help you by saying, look, I've had some rough days in my life, and I'm really glad I kept going, that I kept trying and didn't give up, because I had no idea how good my life could get. A lot of the incredibly negative experiences I've encountered have actually helped me love and appreciate my life and gain perspective. Often someone who's had a really sheltered, easy life can have a hard time being kind and understanding, or a hard time being useful. So I'm out here saying life sucks sometimes, and that's okay. We don't need to make it not suck. We don't need to lie about it sucking. Life sucks sometimes, and that's okay. We don't need to act like it doesn't happen.
That's part of why a game like Warzone can get me there. Sometimes I don't feel like a whole person unless I can explore my nasty side, the part of me that's swearing at people. That doesn't hurt anybody. I'm having fun. I think it's ideal to explore that conscious side consciously, in a way that doesn't hurt other people, and that's what I try to do.
Teaching My Kids What "Disgusting" Really Means
I've noticed some things my kids don't understand yet. My kids will be whining about how bad they have it, and I remember my dad saying, "Boy, you have no idea how good you have it." Now I have a much better idea, and I accept that. My daughter, who's nine, was calling my son, who's seven, disgusting the other day. I told her I'm going to fine her every time she calls him disgusting from now on. They have to pay for their own stuff besides food and shelter. I told her, you have no idea what disgusting even is. You've seen so little of life. You've lived in a sheltered, nice life, and you don't have a clue what real disgusting is. And that's fine. That is okay. One day you're going to understand what I'm saying better, and it's okay if you don't understand it today. Calling your brother disgusting because he farted is nothing. There's life that can get so disgusting that you would beg to be somewhere like this, and it would feel like the cleanest, most beautiful, safest home you've ever been in.
Reading books is one way I broaden my horizons on this. Reading the stories of people who've had really difficult, horrible lives, people who were kidnapped or brought up in abuse or abducted, or who escaped from North Korea, those kinds of stories really help me. They remind me not to be in denial, not to pretend life is good all the time. It's not always good. Sometimes it's so miserably horrible that it's shocking people can even live through it. But ironically, that's part of what makes this experience interesting, and exploring that range of life is a lot of what I share over on my Life playlist.