Stompin’ on ANTs

Suckin’ my soul.

ANTs are Automatic Negative Thoughts. I struggle with them. More often than I would like.

Maybe you do too?

They’re petty, completely random, and shouldn’t bother us—but for some reason they do.

Dissatisfaction is the natural state of the human condition.

It doesn’t matter what you want—clothes, car, career—once you’ve got it, it’s just another part of the same-old, same-old; adding yet another layer of status quo to your life.

• You get food on the shirt before work in the morning.
• You catch a rock in the windshield of the new car.
• The dream job becomes a funking grind.

If you knew how much money and tech was swirling around, keeping you perpetually dissatisfied with just about every aspect of your life, you’d probably want to straight up leave the planet. It’s that bad.

The antidote, then, seems to be mindfulness.

We have to be content.

We have to be happy with who we are, what we have, and where we are.

But we can’t be complacent, either. We can’t settle. Satisfied must never mean stagnant.

We have to pay extra special attention to where we are right now.

We have to be crystal clear about where we’re going next.

Because if we aren’t sure we know what the funk we’re doing and where the funk we’re going, pretty much the entire world is shouting at us all day, every day, reminding us how unhappy we are without whatever they’re selling.

Instead of getting intentionally closer to our goals, we can very easily find ourselves adrift, going with the flow—wherever the flow takes us.

There’s a whole lot of negativity in the world today.

Layered on top of media, social and otherwise, designed almost exclusively to steal attention and serve up advertising—with the express purpose of making us unhappy with what we’ve got so we’ll be more likely to buy more stuff we don’t need—ANTs come marching in from all sides.

I don’t know about you, but when I notice I’ve drifted off course, when I find I’ve been drawn back into the BS, I feel like I’ve wasted even more time.

That’s frustrating.

Damn frustrating.

And the ANTs come marching in.

It’s a hell of a dilemma—being happy with who you are, what you’ve got, and where you are—while continually hustling to be better than you were yesterday.

Stompin’ on ANTs, suckin’ their souls…