Dropping cynicism wasn’t easy, but carrying it was. It’s almost like wearing a warm fuzzy blanket on a cold day while floating over lava. You’re comfortable in the moment, but bound to get burned in the long run. It was a behavior I sought for almost any occasion, with many embracing it as a charming characteristic that lent itself to my twisted personality. Unfortunately, over time it became more of a virus, where instead of people laughing in jest, they were uncomfortable and distant. This emotional virus even started infecting my music, as the cynicism took over whilst judging my own compositions. I noticed it became so bad inside my own head, that I was silently running circles around negative thoughts, which gave way to a massive influx of doubt and instability. This needed to change, and it did, but it wasn’t easy.
Retraining your brain, which has all but hardwired itself to think a certain way, is no easy task, especially when it’s pessimism you’re dealing with. You start to judge and doubt your own actions as if you were your own online comment section. It got to the point where I was sick of this attitude and the entitlement that came with it. I found myself reading people’s comments online about various things, movies, music, food, etc. Everyone was judging and doubting everything as if it were a competition, to be as snarky as possible in an attempt to gain some bizarre form of acceptance. All it really did was display their own obnoxious attitude on a pedestal for the world to witness, with a spotlight on their instability. Even worse, was that I could relate to these people, almost as if we were cut from the same cloth.
Over time, I noticed this behavior more and more, now with political opinions starting to pollute the water. Just when I thought religion was a bad enough argument for them, politics came into the mix, and sent people down a bizarre spiral of antagonistic bullet points supported by nothing more than opinion. Which, funny enough, these people considered said opinions as equal to facts, despite many of them basing their claims on cheap headlines and clickbait. It all got so sickening that I wanted to remove myself from it immediately. But how? Was I supposed to miraculously disappear from that world and live on as a happy little hippie without a care in the world? Of course not. I’m still a realist. What needed to change was my perception of everything. And what’s ironic is that my first attempt to distance myself from all the pessimistic cynics in the world became, in and of itself, another form of pessimism. There I was, judging the judgers and totally letting it get under my skin.
Taking a step back, imagine having an opinion towards something someone else loves, with thoughts that are so diluted, so toxic, and so self absorbed that you feel obligated to infect this other person’s happiness. Whether it be a band, a song, a movie, a belief, or even a political ideology, imagining your opinion is so much more valid than someone else’s, to the point where you aim to ruin their day. Where conversation and civil discussion go out the window, and blind loyalty to something you have no relation to is expected before any logic enters the chat. That sort of entitlement was the behavior I feared I would progress into. While it never truly evolved into such an extreme, it was certainly right around the corner, had I not decided to change my way of thinking.
It wasn’t until I flipped that internal switch when everything changed. I stopped reading all the comments online. I stopped visiting sites like Reddit, which had become a hive mind of shit slinging and negativity. Most importantly, I started putting effort into the things I loved in life. I listened more. I opened up more. I spent more time with the people I cared about, both on and offline. Something as trivial as a conversation with a friend I hadn’t spoken to in so long would spark an infinite amount of care into a friendship almost lost. All these elements started adding up as I stockpiled positivity, which became like a drug, but in this case something beneficial that I could actually sink my claws into.
So how did this affect my music and my creative motivation? Well, it gave me a fresh new canvas to work from, one spawned from hope and enthusiasm. Basic emotions that I had not given a fair shake over the years due to a lack of empathy towards my own behavior. I was never an asshole to people, and always regarded family, friends, and fans with the utmost respect. But many of them would never know that because of how closed off and negative my attitude had become due to years of toxic and selfish thinking. It was a much needed exorcism of demons that I didn’t even see as that big a deal until I dealt with them, and I am a happier person as a result. They say letting go of dead weight is freeing, and I never truly understood that until now. After carrying it for so many years, I didn’t just feel lighter when I let it go, I felt stronger for having carried it at all.
