Every now and then I’ll see something on television that will remind me of the Twilight Zone. The Twilight Zone is unquestionably the greatest television show of all time. Think about the garbage that is on television today and the comparison is laughable. The only comparable shows in terms of writing and acting may be Breaking Bad or The Wire, but for me, I’ll still take The Twilight Zone any day.
There are so many good episodes of The Twilight Zone, but one in particular has always stuck with me as memorable and terrifying at the same time. That episode was “A Nice Place to Visit”.
The episode starts off with a criminal named Rocky robbing a store after killing the guard. The police come and chase him down an alley, after a shootout, he is shot and left to die. He wakes up and a strange old man named Pip is standing over him. Pip helps him up and starts giving him anything he wants. Eventually Rocky realizes he’s dead and that Pip is his guardian angel. He believes he went to heaven and is now getting anything and everything he wants as a reward. Eventually he gets tired of winning everything and starts to believe he went to the wrong place. He thinks he should go to the other place. It’s then that Pip reveals that he is in fact in the other place.
This episode really freaked me out when I was a kid. There’s a number of subtle things that happen that are really weird. In one scene, Rocky has a bunch of attractive women come to his hotel room. He tells them to wait in the bedroom while he talks to Pip. After a minute he goes to check up on them. He says something to them and then does a double take and looks back in the room as if something was wrong. He just kinda shrugs and walks away. This was never explained. What the hell were the women doing? It’s left off camera and always disturbed me.
Another great scene is when Rocky wants Pip to eat the food prepared for him because he thinks it’s been poisoned. Pip refuses and claims he “forgot how”. This always cracked me up. How could Rocky not know something was up when Pip says he forgot how to eat?
The reason that this episode freaked me out was because this version of Hell was so realistic. I grew up Catholic, so I heard stories about Hell early on in life. Whenever I thought of Hell, I would always think of a fire pit, and demons running around torturing you. It wasn’t until I saw this episode that I realized what true Hell was-unending boredom.
Be Thankful for the Struggle
A lot of the blogs that I read in the freedom niche talk about financial freedom and what to do with your money once you have it. Investing, world travel, surfing, and buying things usually fill this space. These are all pleasurable activities. For most of us, the way to get to that state is you have to go through some hardship. What if you didn’t though?
The highs aren’t nearly as high in your life if you don’t have to go through lows to get there. You have no frame of reference if you never had to face adversity. There are many who have to endure this fate in life. People who are born rich will always have in the back of their head that they only accomplished something because they had a head start in life. There isn’t much risk when they start an endeavor and they have the money to finance everything. When their plans work out, they don’t experience as much joy because they didn’t start from the bottom.
Another example of this is when you see a naturally gifted athlete who isn’t a real competitor. For years they get by on the fact that they were given a gift. This makes them lazy a lot of the time. The training and practice it takes to be the best are seen to them as beneath them. They never had to work to win, why start now? Then they get to a level where everyone is almost as good, or better than them, and they start losing. They usually aren’t very good losers.
An example of someone like this was BJ Penn. He was a great MMA fighter who was incredibly fast. It was always a question of what BJ would show up for the fight. If he trained diligently, he would dominate. If he got beat badly, it would come out that he slacked off in his training. This happened a lot. Another example was the NBA star Allen Iverson. Iverson was also very fast, but refused to build any strength. This hurt him later in his career when his speed started to fade. He was also famous for a press conference in which he declared he didn’t need practice.
What is life?
Bad things will inevitably happen to you in life. When they do happen, you have a choice to make. You can play the victim of fate and sulk in the corner of the room, or you use the negativity as a learning experience. Remember what we learned from Rocky, when you are given everything, after a while you become bored. He was willing to go to Hell and experience negativity rather then face more boredom.
This goes well with my philosophy in life. What is the point of life? It’s to experience things. We are consciousness that incorporated into a biology suit to experience this virtual reality. We are living in a really big video game. The reason we can’t remember anything is because if we did, it would make the game pointless. It would be boring. We’re here to experience things, so go out and have experiences.
The Good with the Bad
The philosophy I described gives you a certain freedom from dwelling on the bad. It lets you look at the situation with the mindset that it may be bad, but at least I’m not bored. You will start to take bad things in stride as part of the overall experience of living. Don’t be crippled by the negative experiences in your life.
With this philosophy, the bad becomes better, and the good becomes great. Everything becomes part of the reason of why we are here. Besides accepting the bad things that happen, we should also be striving to have good experiences every day. This will ensures growth and a rich life.
Boredom is the enemy
Whenever you find yourself getting into the same routine every day that you hate, change it the hell up. When I was working my 9-5 I was so bored with my day to day activity. I was ready and willing to face some adversity rather than relegate myself to more years of boredom.
If you find yourself in the same situation as I did, the key is to take repetitive action to change your subconscious programming. Most of the day you will be running on programs in your subconscious and you can’t just change them by thinking about doing something different. Repetitive action is the key. Go and do likewise.
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