Are you scared? All the time? Me too.

Holy shit. How's the media feed lately, hey? Between Trump, Brexit, Euro conspiracies, SA politics, currency fluctuations, stock markets going haywire and the ever present Facebook/Twitter feed keeping you 100% up to date on it all, how the hell are we supposed to stay zenned out in bliss?

Fear! It's being sold to us all day long, every day, through every channel we open up to the outside world and it's always got an agenda behind it. Energy is scarce, be scared, you won't be able to drive your car or light your house, why don't you buy our oil/solar panels/fill in the product here...

Quit your job! Be an entrepreneur or you'll never be rich! Bollocks, I know plenty people that steadily plod on with their jobs, grow their income over many years, invest a bit of it here and there and end up being significantly wealthy. Stop being scared you'll never be rich. It's not that important anyways.

Get a degree, get the job you've always wanted! You'll be happier than you dreamed possible! If you don't get that degree, you'll die! Or worse, you'll be alive without a degree! What bollocks, I know plenty people with degrees that never use them. Generally happy people that realised that making a lifelong decision on what to do with your life at 18 when you leave highschool is probably going to be a decision worth revising when you've grown a bit more. Might as well not place so much pressure on yourself for so many years with so much money at stake. If you're 18/19 years old now and someone is telling you to be scared of your future and start planning now and go study and go spend another 4 years of your life learning impractical shit, tell 'em to stuff off and just go do whatever the hell you wanted to do as a kid but were too busy doing schoolwork, after school activities like ballet, karate, music lessons etc. Go travel. Go relax on a beach for 3 months. Chill. You've got time and hopefully no kids yet as a massive responsibility. Experiment with doing things you simply like doing. Wanna study art in a university? Why not simply buy some paints, pencils and stuff and simply do it.. in a cool place that inspires you. Wanna study music? Start a band and learn to play something by ear first. Do it for fun before you dedicate your life to it.

Social media has us connected to so many people, doing so many things, and so many news sources (pretty much everyone's a news source now) that it's freakin hard to block out the noise and not be scared, even for a moment. I struggle with it every day.

I recently blocked my Facebook account for 30 days while I went traveling with my wife and 2 toddlers. It was amazing. I felt free. I went swimming every day. Boating, road tripping, airplanes, chilling on a lake in the mountains, scalloping in the Gulf waters.. My family and I were very present in most moments during this trip and I felt...free.

For a second, I wasn't scared anymore.

“What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?”

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best-” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have; and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, “What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘What about a little something?’ and Me saying, ‘Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.”

“I like that too,” said Christopher Robin, “but what I like doing best is Nothing.”

― A.A. Milne