The Choking Smog

It's 4.40. I'm very tired this morning after waking up a little early - to be honest on any other day it would have been a perfect time - a time that gives me the room to center myself and do everything I'm doing now. But I don't feel rested enough. It's okay. This is the muscle I need to build. Pushing past the pain and doing it anyway. I need to be brave enough to be disciplined - to do the good I know I ought to do. I can trust God with the rest.

I had an interesting revelation today. It's easy to get sucked into comparative obsession. Mimesis is a choking smog. Coveting your neighbor's belongings. Wanting what others have. What people shout about. What seems like the norm. But the norm can be misleading. What we think is average is very rarely so. There is a huge divide between what we may know in our head to be true and what we feel in our bones.

There is a lot of pretending going on. Everyone believes everyone else is better off than they are, and so everyone acts as though they are better off than they are. Everyone ends up spending more than they should because we are all comparing ourselves to the specter of false ideals. It’s the Abilene paradox. Everyone regresses to a false mean, thinking that others have logic behind their conviction.

We focus on what we think should be true. We're looking to each other for cues. We want to know what the baseline is. What's acceptable and what isn't. What's true? What's real? We get sucked into microcosms and echo chambers - tunnels of reciprocated thought that lead us to false impressions of the world.