The Antidote to Outrage: How to Avoid Taking the Bait From Society
By: Ayodeji Awosika
Tags: Mental Health, Equality, Culture, Education, Psychology

The Antidote to Outrage: How to Avoid Taking the Bait From Society

On navigating the murky societal waters

At this point, I feel it’s my job to keep you relatively sane, focused, and adaptable to the times. Because, let me tell you, we’re just getting started. In several articles and videos, I talked about how 2020 would turn out and how it will continue to turn out.

While I didn’t predict the specifics, obviously, I was dead on about the general sentiment. It’s an election year, which means that the outrage dial is going to turn all the way up. The tragedies are real, but much of the chaos is manufactured.

The world is going to be painted as a much worse place than it actually is, each political side is going to fan the flames and trigger their bases based on the narratives they implanted in their minds long ago.

And most everyone is going to fall for it. Everyone already is falling for it. People are having arguments with straw men, fictional ghosts created by the media.

All of a sudden, every individual instance of injustice is being displayed right in front of your face. Funny how the frequency of these events on social media has multiplied by 50.

Instead of realizing that the world will never be perfect, people will create a mental self-fulfilling prophecy. They’ll look for tragedy, which the world is rife with, and they’ll always find something because there will always be something.

Oftentimes people paint me as indifferent to the problems of the world when the opposite is true. I’m acutely aware of the problems of the world. I just focus on what makes sense, what’s useful, and what will move the needle at certain times.

Guess what won’t move the needle? Misdirected social media anger, apathy, overly upsetting yourself over the times, nihilism, I could go on here, but you get it.

I wouldn’t be mentioning these kinds of ideas in a self-improvement piece if they weren’t heavy on everyone’s minds one hundred percent of the time. So allow me to use the fundamental tenets of self-improvement to show you how to navigate this time.

Understand the Upside

Always, always, always remember — two things can be true at the same time.

On the one hand, the psyche of the country, and the world, is quite fragile right now for good reason. On the other hand, still, even right now, we’ve never lived in a more abundant, prosperous, free, and opportunistic society.

67,000 people follow me on Medium. I’m guessing the majority of them are white. Goes against the narrative that we’re damn near living in Jim Crow times, doesn’t it?

Last week I read a book about the life of Fredrick Douglas. Last night I re-watched the movie, Malcolm X.

As a logical person, I can say pretty objectively that it’s much better to be a black person in America than it used to be. Doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist and it doesn’t mean racism isn’t a problem. But I simply have a much higher upside than a black person 50 plus years ago — irrefutable.

For me, I don’t think the abolitionists and civil rights leaders worked so hard just for us to feel helpless and oppressed in perpetuity. I think they’d want us to move forward, take some of our victories and build on them, while still never settling until we get all the way there.

You can do all of these things at the same time.