Woman on TikTok: “The man in my life is such a loser!”

Comment section: “Grumble grumble grumble! You should dump him!”

Woman on TikTok: “Oh, uh, actually, I lied, he’s great…”

Comment section: “Dump him anyway! You deserve better!”

Yeah… social media sure has gotten fun, hey?

I’m no longer surprised the Bible has excellent advice about how to deal with it. A younger me would have been – now I realise that, no matter how modern the problem seems, the answer is in there.

A fool’s lips bring strife, and his mouth invites a flogging. A fool’s mouth is his ruin, and his lips are a snare to himself.

Proverbs 18:6-7 (RSV)

When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but he who restrains his lips is prudent.

Proverbs 10:19 (RSV)

A perverse man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends.

Proverbs 16:28 (RSV)

For lack of wood the fire goes out; and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases.

Proverbs 26:20 (RSV)

This isn’t an exhaustive list of relevant passages.

It doesn’t even cover everything the Proverbs have to say about it.

You spend enough time on social media and you realise why gossip is a hated sin. It’s not to keep poor oppressed women from comparing notes like some bitter harpies claim. It’s because gossip is awful for everyone.

Social media is a gossip machine. Folks post inane stuff – mostly untrue – and then strangers comment on it like they know what they’re talking about.

It’s gossip.

And it doesn’t help anyone. It’s a wickedly weak mind that wants to talk about people so desperately.

“Says the guy who won’t shut up. How many hundreds of days have you been posting this manure?”

I don’t talk about people, though. Even when discussing famous folks, I tend to obfuscate.

Because the individual isn’t important.

It’s what you can learn and apply that matters.

On that note, here’s something for your noggin that’s not condemned by the Bible dozens of times over:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

This isn’t an original sentiment.

That’s for a reason – there’s a lot of wisdom here.

And I’m writing about this now because I got a fresh reminder of it. The last few days, I’ve felt off my game. Tired, unfocused, slow.

I’ve still been getting things done, but nowhere near as much as I would like.

I just thought it was a lot of hard work catching up with me. These curious emails you get daily aren’t the only thing I have going on. There’s a lot more writing – thousands of words more – plus I’m designing some things that’ll wrinkle your socks.

Between that, my gym training, too little sleep (I know, I know, I should be better about that) and plenty of social events, I’ve been running myself a bit thin.

But when I went to the gym today, I knew it was something more.

Five minutes in and I could barely breathe. Ten minutes and I thought my head was going to burst into flame.

I stuck with my full routine, even if I dialled back the intensity. It’s time to take a short break, though. I might be coming down with something or it’s my body’s way of telling me to cool it.

Fair enough – I’ll listen.

And if I hadn’t gone to the gym, pushed myself to my limits and found the cracks in my armour, I wouldn’t have heard it.

Failure is good because how you fail is instructive. In my case, I couldn’t summon my usual physical power because my body needed it. Good to know.

Better to be aware of that than to stumble through, operating at 60% and not knowing why.

The cracks tell you where the weak points are and what needs patching.

Bless the cracks. No one else will give you such clear and useful information.

It does mean some of my content might be late. I’ll do my best to keep the material flowing though.

In the meantime, you can get your eyes on this:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

I spent about ten minutes staring at a blank document before writing this.

That’s unusual. Normally I find writing these emails easy. I get an idea, hammer it out and then fire it off.

My writing process is so smooth I wrote a book about how to write faster – and I wrote that in a single day.

Today, though, my brain has lurched between three different states.

Chilling out,

Design,

And writing.

So when I sat down to write this, I couldn’t get my brain into the right gear. First I couldn’t think of an idea for today’s email, then I couldn’t write it.

That is, until I could.

Sometimes you’re at the mercy of the whims of your brain. You might be slow and sluggish because you’re tired. It might be hard to focus because you have too many distractions.

Often, the wise thing is to work with your brain, not against it.

If you’re tired, rest.

Oh, if only it were always so easy…

Because sometimes, yes, you need to change gears.

You need to make yourself focus because that’s the only way you’ll get things done.

You need to shape your own mind, not just go with its flows.

When that’s the case, having the right tool for shaping your thinking helps:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

If you haven’t seen The Chosen yet, please do. 

I hesitated at first. Shows dramatising the events of the Bible have a history of being mediocre. The Chosen isn’t. In fact, it’s one of the better TV shows I’ve seen in the last few years. 

The production values are excellent, the writing flows, the acting is superb and every scene overflows with professional care. 

Few of the shots seem like they must have been absurdly difficult to pull off. 

And the show has plenty of surprises – even a few twists. 

Yes, they’re faithfully telling a story you already know and they still manage to surprise you. That’s how good it is.  

They even release it for free – and I mean free. No advertising or anything like that. It’s clearly a work of love and they want as many folks to see it as possible.  

That means they have to cover their costs in the usual alternatives to a paywall – donations, merch and a staggered release. Some folks got to see Season 4 by buying a ticket at a nearby cinema. The rest of us must wait til it’s free on the app. 

And some folks don’t like that. 

They’re eager to see the next season. I get it – so am I. But their petulance and impatience on having to wait for a high-quality, free show is absurd. 

We’re Christians, people. Waiting is what we do. It’s been nearly 2000 years since Jesus left and we’ve spent that time waiting. Not just waiting – also preparing for his return. But waiting nonetheless.  

The Second Coming might be in five minutes from now. 

Or it might be in 10,000 years. 

We don’t know. We can’t and shouldn’t know. Whatever the timeframe is, all we can do is wait patiently. 

So I’m pretty sure we can handle a delay of a few weeks, people. 

Other things Christians should be – but aren’t always – good at: 

Loving our neighbours. 

Kindness and compassion. 

Teaching folks how they need to be taught, not what’s easiest for us. 

That’s why I wrote Your Story Isn’t About You – it helps with all that: 

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

Earlier today I opened to a random psalm and got this:

Let a good man strike or rebuke me in kindness, but let the oil of the wicked never anoint my head; for my prayer is continually against their wicked deeds.

Psalms 141:5 (RSV)

Two things to like here:

The second is that part about the wicked anointing with oil. It’s that Tolkien idea that evil can’t create, only imitate. Beware evil deeds that mask themselves as holy ones.

The first is a real Christian chad vibe:

Praying to be rebuked.

Don’t wish for an easy life – pray for the strength to handle a challenging life.

Call for good folks to condemn your weaknesses and push your limits.

So consider this your next condemnation, you sly fool. Pray for redemption as if your life depends on it. The woke say “be better”. I say be worthy of the sacrifices of Jesus.

And that’s your spiritual training for now.

For your mental training, continue here:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

Clarkson’s Farm is a strange show.

It’s exhausting to watch as Jeremy Clarkson tries to run a farm. Even with excellent help from talented locals, every day is a struggle.

The weather and the government work against him at every turn.

He rarely has a win. When he does, it never lasts.

The show is a constant parade of defeat and disappointment.

You wouldn’t think a show like this would be soothing, but it is. Clarkson is such a bloke – he has the blokeish attitude of, eh, I’ll figure it out.

It’s a key difference between masculine and feminine styles of thinking. Women tend to want a plan. Men know they can handle whatever comes up, so they tend to dive right in and figure it out as they go.

Both styles have their strengths – differences like this are why men and women make such good teams.

But we live in a bureaucratic world. You can’t so much as fetch the mail without filling out a risk assessment, environmental impact survey and notarised business plan.

The world wants everything to be nice, safe and predictable. That’s where the feminine thrives, but it’s not accurate. You can only plan so much – the rest you need to improvise.

If you stop to think out every choice, you’ll be just as wrong and a lot slower.

Now, Clarkson’s Farm doesn’t work. You can’t figure out farming as you go any more than you could improvise a fight against Mike Tyson. At the cutting edge and in farming, you need to optimise everything. The margins are too thin to do otherwise.

But his spirit of have a go and figure out the details later is soothing. It’s like a tonic for the masculine urge to wander off and live off the land.

All of that has nothing to do with this, except how they’re both good:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

So I was doing some reading earlier – psychology and philosophy – and some smart and capable thinkers took on a question:

Can you feel an emotion outside your conscious awareness?

Can you be angry, sad, scared, happy or whatever, and not even realise?

Forget about mentally ill folks who’re violently repressing their own experiences. Focus on typical people.

Many of these experts said, no, of course you can’t feel something and not know it. Some of them even said that idea is a contradiction in terms.

Well, good for them. I’m sure they’ve put a lot of thought into their absurd and ridiculous take.

I could talk about this from a neurological perspective. I could point out that emotions evolved before consciousness and tend to emerge closer to the core of the brain, bypassing the self-reflecting parts towards in the frontal cortex, but I won’t.

You can relate to all these experiences, whether you’ve lived out these examples or not:

There’s someone in your social circle who you don’t think much of. Then when they become unavailable – they move away or start dating someone else or whatever – you realise how fond of them you’ve always been.

A friend gets a promotion while you’re struggling at work. You’d swear you’re happy for them, except you spend the rest of the day in a foul mood.

You love your job. Then, after spending a few weeks on holidays, you dread going back. You realise you always dreaded it but you just sucked it up and got on with it.

This can happen for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes you don’t want to admit how you feel. Sometimes you and your life are so complex you don’t even know what you feel.

Here’s the thing:

Emotions compel you to act.

They don’t need you to think. In some cases, thinking will just get in the way.

It’s funny how much of your life happens outside your awareness. That doesn’t mean it’s outside your control, though. You can train, guide and refine the unconscious parts of you.

Not by choosing to.

Plenty of folks choose to give up smoking, sugar or erotica, only to fall back into old habits.

No, your unconscious mind needs a different approach.

If you don’t spot what that approach is in Your Story Isn’t About You, that’s fine. It’ll still work out for you:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

The Bible has many stories of struggle, war and conflict.

In some, wise and brave heroes overcome insurmountable odds. David beating Goliath is the example in our culture of an underdog snatching a surprise victory.

In other stories, the heroes have every advantage yet still lose.

It’s not obvious at first glance what the difference is, but it’s there.

Plain as day.

The heroes who win don’t make decisions without praying on it first.

When I clasp my hands in prayer, they form a line 5.5 centimetres thick (depending on where you measure it). Your line might vary, but not by much.

It’s not a lot of thickness, yet it divides the world into winners and losers.

So if you want to take time to pray on this decision, I salute you.

When you’re ready, follow this link:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

This is going to be an oversimplification and an overgeneralisation.

That means I’m not talking about you, so it doesn’t have to perfectly describe you.

But if any of this rings true for you at all…

There are some folks who, through mental laziness, an indulgent upbringing or just plain stupidity, try to make sense of other people in simple ways.

Like they apply a too-simplistic rule (“all men are intimidated by me”).

Or they assume everyone thinks like them (“I’d never get upset by this, so they’re just faking those tears”).

Or they forget that Professor X is a) one dude and b) fictional (“isn’t it OBVIOUS that I want a sandwich? Why aren’t they getting me one too?”).

Folks like this are miserable and pathetic. There’s no excusing being this self-absorbed and oblivious. It’s a universal, fundamental and essential human trait to figure out what others think.

All happiness and success lies on the other side of figuring out what people want and need from you.

Bypassing that dooms you. It dooms you hard.

The worst part is when you inevitably fail – when romantic prospects don’t see how OBVIOUSLY AMAZING you are or “stupid customers” don’t get your OBVIOUSLY AMAZING products – you won’t even think to look to the cause.

You’ll blame anyone and everyone else for your failure to interest them.

It’s sad.

And, while this has dogged every generation, it’s rampant now.

You’d think this would be difficult to teach, but you’d be wrong.

That’s what Your Story Isn’t About You covers. Getting out of your own head and seeing the world as others see it- it’s your duty and you’ll likely earn great rewards for it.

If not, you can keep the windows of your mind closed and the curtains drawn until the air in your skull turns stale and you choke.

It’s up to you:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

You have two voices coming at you right now.

One is telling you to grind, hustle and move your butt. Go, go, go! There’s no time to rest right now! Build! Stop being such an embarrassment to your ancestors!

The other whispers hey, no, it’s okay. Sometimes it’s right to take a break. Sometimes just surviving is enough of an accomplishment. No one needs you to grind yourself into a fine powder just to make money. It’s not like you can take it with you.

Which way, modern man?

As the girl from the taco ads asks, why not both?

You have to master both. Sloth is a sin and rest is an obligation. Yeah, those are opposites because life is nuanced.

Figure it out.

Work harder and rest more – if you put your mind to it, you can do both.

And if you want a sharper mind with which to put things:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay