The older I’ve gotten, the more I seem allergic to bullshit. Perhaps consequentially of having ingested a ton when younger, overeager and seeking shortcuts to success, fortune, and fame. I deep-dived into every corner of “personal development,” self-help, and motivational hustle-culture stuff I could… and didn’t see until afterwards how much straight bullshit there are in those trenches, mixed in with all the sugar-coated feel-good dogma.
No doubt, I was under the grips of many cognitive biases then - willing to overlook cracks & faults, seeking to confirm the ego’s desires that things could happen as quick & easy as the “gurus” promised/sold. As much as I had a disdain for traditional authorities - governmental figures, religions, anything coming from corporatized institutional complexes - I ended up handing over alot of time, energy, and $$$ to many others who’d positioned themselves as “authorities” on entrepreneurial success. After all, if they managed to create/attract extraordinary results and so confidently asserted their formulas & strategies worked flawlessly for others, why not. Oh, how naive I still was.
True to the 6/2 Human Design profile stumbling my way through my twenties with a ton of “trial-and-error,” it was perhaps all that experience that was necessary to form the neural networks that activated a stronger “bullshit detector.” Only so much can be taught through textbooks & lectures, versus getting one’s feet wet in a full spectrum of direct life experience and being exposed to unspoken subtleties & nuances that when becoming aware of enough of, heighten the capacity for complex pattern recognition. And once you see certain things & patterns, you can’t unsee them.
Like how much bullshit there is still being tossed around by all sorts of “coaches” and self-appointed know-it-alls trying to sell people on the delusional idea “you can have, do, and/or be anything you want.”
No, no, no.
Granted, I get it.
People wanna make money. One consistent way of doing it: telling people what they wanna hear. There’s a damn big market for hopium of all sorts. And as it’s been said, “there’s a sucker born every minute.” While I may have had my introductions to the world of elated grandiose promises of “you can have anything you want” a couple decades ago back when the movie, The Secret, was a hot item, there’s a whole younger generation just beginning to go through their rites of passage through these realms of bullshit now… and somebody’s gotta serve them… and milk it for the money thrown at hopium.
And don’t get me wrong here - this isn’t to be completely “negative,” cynical, pessimistic, and suggest that it’s not worth going after one’s dreams or people can’t achieve amazing feats. There is alot one can do, be & have in this life. But limits also exist - and need to be acknowledged and worked within should one have any realistic hope of achieving anything. “Positive thinking” has it’s time & place… but there’s no electrical current with only a positive charge, and nothing gets “manifested” with one’s head so far in the clouds there’s no feet on the ground.
Yet, there’s alot of people propagating & buying into ideas & beliefs that sever that connection with earthly realities in favor of ego-mind desires.
There’s alot of self-positioned “experts” regurgitating teachings that while have their merit, time & place, end up committing small but significant faults in amplifying & distorting points that end up corrupting their truthfulness & potency, misleading others & ourselves - no matter how “good” the intentions or “positive” the thinking.
As often as there are “life coaches” - (often selling others on dreams of being “life coaches,” who frequently make their money selling others programs teaching how to be “life coaches” selling the same programs, in true MLM-pyramid style) - pitching the “anything you want” fantasy, complete with picture-perfect social media reels of beaches, luxury cars & private jets, I was taken aback recently to see/hear someone I know in the Human Design space utter the same thing. Especially surprising, given one of the foundational premises repeatedly emphasized by its ‘founder,’ that of ”no choice” - a perspective weighted far more to the “predestination/blueprint” end of spectrum in the debate for/against “free will;”
Addressing the discrepancy with diplomacy & respect, open-minded to a new perspective where they may have seen what I hadn’t their reply offered little to reconcile the paradox other than some word salad to dodge the question. Perhaps I expected too much.
And it’s something I’ve witnessed more than once in the Human Design realm: a mishmash of HD with pop rhetoric, watering down the core teachings with regurgitated self-help marketing slogans… diverting from the foundational principles of deconditioning from “not-self,” slipping in the back door with appeals to ego and yet more subtle reinforcements of conditioned ideas - be it via promises that “you can have any experience you want” or protocols for “reprogramming” (how that isn’t just more conditioning, I can’t figure out.)
I really do wish to give others the benefit of the doubt most of the time, to better grasp the place & value of what they share in order to see from new & different angles and extract the wisdom in their perspectives - even if there may be challenges in interpreting/navigating the nuances in their languaging used. But then there come times when ya just gotta remain firm in common sense and trust in the bullshit detector.
“The ‘no choice’ refers to the mechanics,” was part of their reply. Okay… but “any experience you want” doesn’t depend on mechanics…? C’mon.
”You can have any experience you want…?”
What about the crippled midget that wants to be a NBA all-star?
R. Kelly may have wanted to - and believed he could - fly… but one step off the edge of a skyscraper, and gravity is taking its course.
It’d be a safe bet that millions of people in the Middle East wanted peace and regrown limbs yesterday… did they not “raise their vibration” high enough…?
I want to experience a $589 XRP and abolition of income tax worldwide by the end of the week… yeah.
Am I misinterpreting the meaning of “anything?”
So am I being “negative” in my “calling bullshit” here?
Or is this my (Human Design) Cross Of Demands at play - up here on the roof and 52 personality sun perched on the mountain, looking down at these cultural narratives of fantasy perpetuated to keep people high on hopium to sell coaching programs, assessing with wisdom & objective discernment - voicing these observations with “demand” that we collectively grow up a bit to stop deluding ourselves & others with sugar-coated “inspirational” rhetoric detached from reality… ultimately for the purpose of increasing our capacity to actually work effectively with what we’ve got to make a satisfying difference rather than egoically-masterbating to woofuckery and hustle-porn…?
Maybe I should just mind my own damn business and accept that of the 8 billion people on this planet, alot of us are gonna get lost in some bullshit or another and waste years in cult fantasies of all sorts. Or maybe distilling the lessons of my own experience and shining light on some of this - no matter how small an audience it may reach - does make some sorta small difference as seeding codes for upgraded discernment into the morphogenic fields of collective consciousness.
(And/or maybe to some degree, part of these triggered-rants are merely intellectual masterbation and cognitive bias at play - rationalizing staying “stuck” in cynicism rather than accepting/embracing/clarifying what I actually want, committing to, and following through on it… whether self-sabotaging hyperfocus or cleverly-justified procrastination.)
I don’t fucking know.
But I sure as fuck know that the crippled midget ain’t gonna be no NBA all-star, nor XRP at $589 and income tax abolished by the end of week… no matter how much “positive thinking” anyone employs.
So it’d seem the “you can experience anything you want” assertion is proven bullshit. Case closed.
And if God / the universe wants to prove me wrong… bring it on, and the celebration drinks are on me. 👻