There is a lot of fear out there in the world. And there are a lot of people out there telling you to be afraid. The bogeyman is coming to get you – be very afraid. The deficit is killing the economy • Government spending got us through the pandemic • Vaccines will give you autism • Vaccines are the only thing that will save you • If you interfere with my religious freedom to not bake that cake, you are violating my rights • If your behavior isn’t in line with the actual teachings of Jesus, you are not a Christian • Georgie Soros and the Illuminati are forming one world government • Gerrymandering is killing democracy • The Muslims /the Jews / the Evangelicals are coming to get us • Undocumented workers are taking our jobs • Do you want to come pick the tomatoes and cantaloupes? • The rich are the job creators • Small businesses create jobs and opportunity - Everybody and everything gets its turn at being the bogeyman.

Whether you fear death panels, creationism, being limited to one hamburger a month, cannibalism, being told what you can and can’t do with your body, or believe that cows farting is causing climate change, you all are aware of the fear-based insanity we have been living through. And everybody is doing it – certain members of the clergy, quite a number of politicians, and various media empires catering to whoever will listen to them, are using fear to manipulate the masses into frothing-at-the-mouth levels of fear and anger. This is nothing new, but it has reached levels that are moving us toward the point where we have all taken leave of our senses and trust no one and believe nothing.

Any political leader, media figure, or someone in a corporate/business environment, trying to scare you is someone to run from. Usually they tell you either they are the ones to fix it or it can’t be fixed. So do as you are told. Don’t think for yourself. Facts don’t exist. Um, yes they do. They are not interested in the greater good. What they seek to do is pit you against friends, neighbors, family, in order to serve their own ambitions or their political or business agendas.

There are scary things happening that do need to be addressed with a quickness. But the answer is never to give your power to others and then cower and quake in fear, nor to get so angry, as a response to your fear, that you are incited to harm others or yourself. So let’s take a small step together toward addressing all of the fear that is out there and, hopefully at the same time, take some of our power back, thus robbing the bogeyman of his power over us.

When our fears come up, they tend to cluster in certain groupings. We all have patterns. That is normal, expected and human. So, it is always helpful, when some hobgoblin is trying to push your buttons, to know which button is being pushed and then take their finger off your button.

For some of us, we fear that we will somehow or for some reason be abandoned or rejected or humiliated, or betrayed. Now these all work together in all kinds of combinations. But as example, I fear being abandoned, left all on my own to fend for myself and, in being abandoned, I will also feel rejected. And because I was rejected, it is so humiliating to me that “they” would do this to me, that I feel betrayed by those I loved or trusted or relied on. In whatever combination or in whatever arena of my life the fear presents itself, this is where I go. I was rejected because I was not good enough, says the fear, and that feels humiliating to me. My trust was betrayed and now I feel humiliated for ever having trusted whomever. I fear friends, family, people will abandon me. You see how this can go. For many of us, though we each have our own pattern of it, this is the button that gets pushed when we are afraid.

For others of us, I fear the punishment of a martyr. No matter how hard I have tried or have worked, no matter how much I have loved or given, no matter how much I have personally sacrificed, no one will appreciate it. No one will understand what I have been through, how I have suffered, fearing they will misunderstand my good intentions. Or, I am being expected to do things that are beyond my responsibility, beyond my paygrade, if you will, beyond my capabilities. I am afraid of getting punished for things that I had nothing to do with. Martyred somehow, for some reason. “Why should I suffer and only get one hamburger a month when it isn’t my fault?” “They did or didn’t do . . . whatever. Why am I being punished?” You see how this can play out from the absurd to real work situations or within relationships. “After all I have done for you . . . The sacrifices I have made, the things I have given up.” The fear of being martyred and punished in the process.

A third grouping of fears for some of us is the fear that if I am not perfect – at work, as a parent, in an intimate relationship, as a friend – that I will get blamed. That I will fall short, for some reason, of my own expectations of myself, much less everybody else’s expectations. Afraid of not getting it right. Afraid of being wrong or incorrect or misguided or having misunderstood. What that really means is I will blame myself or others will blame me for not being perfect. The demand of perfection is often what many of us substitute for lack of self-trust. And when we have not learned to trust ourselves, we are open to being manipulated by those who seek to make us doubt ourselves and be fearful.

Others of us fear exclusion. It is not the same as fear of abandonment. Everybody else will get something but I will be excluded or left out or it won’t work for me. You see a lot of this societally in the anger that so many have about some group or another supposedly getting advantages or tangible benefits that I am being excluded from receiving. And that makes me mad because I am being excluded but they are not. I am being left out. And that fear triggers a lot of people.

Now, these are not the only clusters or groupings of fear. And, again, we all have our own patterns. When you look at yours, you will be amazed at the consistency of that pattern. Look at where you go when your buttons get pushed. You can start taking your power back just by recognizing what is happening and by refusing to give your power away to a habituated response to someone trying to make you feel afraid. You will find, as some darned Democrat once said, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. And in recognizing that, you will have learned a universal truth that transcends politics, media and religion.

Living Skills offers positive psychology counseling, spiritual counseling, and life coaching services in Atlanta, and online. We are sensitive to the needs of the LGBT community. Sessions available by Skype. Please email us at livingskillsinc@gmail.com or visit www.livingskills.pro. Podcast: “The Problem with Humans” now available on Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, and Spotify, Overcast, Castro, Castbox, and Podfriend, as well as on my site. Follow us on Twitter - @livingskillsinc

The 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy was based on the memoir of Gypsy Rose Lee, a burlesque entertainer known for, among other things, her striptease act. The show was turned into a movie and one of the numbers that I loved in the movie was the song, “You Gotta Have A Gimmick.” Three strippers tell Louise that you don’t need talent to be a stripper. What you need is a gimmick. “You gotta get a gimmick if you want to get ahead.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkO4Ae2gPsQ

Human history is ripe with people in pursuit of the magick bullet or quick fix that will solve all of their problems and, if God is really good, make them rich as well, with as little effort as possible. The human desire to get rich quick has evidently been with us since at least biblical times. Proverbs 13:11 as quoted in the New American Standard Bible says, “Wealth obtained from nothing dwindles, But one who gathers by labor increases it.” So this human drive has been with us for quite some time.

I started thinking about gimmicks again while I was watching the recent documentary about WeWork on Hulu. Social media and technology are the latest scheme that is supposed to make us rich quickly and deliver us to the Promised Land. Tech was supposed to help us pull out of the Great Recession. WeWork defined itself as a co-working community that was created for small businesses, entrepreneurs and freelancers with the idea that people in that communal community would almost be forced to help one another and in so doing, not only rebel against the office culture of the 80s and 90s but change the way people work and redefine success. Their words, not mine. Kind of a tall order given the research that shows open offices actually decrease creativity and productivity.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have been in WeWork and like it, the free kombucha kegs on every floor notwithstanding. The short and dirty version of the story is the venture capital people saw it as a way to make a lot of money quick, threw enormous amounts of money at the company, all of which was mismanaged and, like they say, the rest is history. My point is, instead of slow steady grow and planning, they went for the quick and easy, all in the name of changing the world and lots of money. Now, while the argument can be made that a few tech companies have changed the word, Apple, Google, FB, etc., the overwhelming majority of companies have not. And, how many app developers in WeWork spaces do we really need or can the world absorb?

Also, we are told, that Millennials want a calling, not just a job or a career. Here is the thing. You are called to a calling, you don’t go out and find it. It will find you, come to you, and not let you go. I had a friend years ago who used to go to Become a Shaman School. In the course of a few weekends or whatever the training timeframe was, you were taught to be a shaman. I think not. Wikipedia defines Shamanism as “a religious practice that involves a practitioner who is believed to interact with a spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct these spirits or spiritual energies into the physical world, for healing or another purpose.” Shamans are thought to not only be able to see beyond the veils but to walk between the veils that separate different levels of reality. I am not doubting shamanism at all. I am doubting you’ll learn that level of enlightenment over a few weekends. And if you are to be a shaman, you will be called and you will know it. And the preparation will take years and will not be a day at the beach. No path of spiritual development is.

Want instant relationship? Swipe right and find true love. Do the personality test and get matched to your soulmate. Gay guys love what I call the Pre-husband Interview. The checklist that they run somebody through before they even go on a date. Do you like - this movie, this kind of food, this music or recording artist, this sport, this hobby, this video games. Do they have the right answers about friends, family, politics, kids, religion, places they want to travel and can they cook? If it all checks out, now we can go on a date. The fly in that ointment is that first you must do the hard work of developing a relationship with yourself.

Our politics have become a shrine to dogma and talking points. Lots of righteous blame and anger on both sides. But no matter how many times Bernie says, “If you have to steal an election to win it, you are a coward,” true as that is, it won’t fix the voter suppression and gerrymandering that has become commonplace.

Want to be healthy? All you’ve got to do is eat spirulina plankton and radishes. Want to be spiritual? Become vegan, even though veganism is a diet not a spiritual path. Want to avoid disease? Take Vitamin D and your problems will be solved. Groupon tells me true health will be mine when I have my vagina steamed.

The ATSs – the applicant tracking systems – that reject 75% of job applicants, supposedly because they don’t contain the right words. But there is not a National Resume Bureau from which to get the list of the “right” words. And nobody wants to do the hard work of actually having to read a resume.

The endless apps that we must have that are supposed to conduct and manage our lives for us. The apps that keep track of how long each individual egg has been in your smart refrigerator. Coloring book apps for your phone in case you don’t have enough else to do. How about the human to animal translator app? How about one of the apps that measures how high in the air you can throw you phone? Then there is the app that lets you stream your conversations and crowdsource them by bringing a group of your friends or strangers along to listen in and assist you. If you don’t know what to say on a date, a meeting, or any other situation – just let some other people help you.

Love, relationships, the environment, politics, work, spiritual development, personal development – becoming authentic, being a good person - raising children, education, and more are all substantive, complex, complicated subjects. They all need serious attention with intention to move forward with them. Contrary to the most earnest human desire for the magic bullet, the gimmick that will fix it all instantaneously, there is no such thing. The only way out is through. We are here to learn. Life and learning is a process. We must do the long, slow steady work it takes in any area of life to see and produce substantive results. So the next time you have a desire to start flipping houses, remembering the Great Recession. The next time somebody tells you the way become enlightened is sell everything and move to Machu Picchu, remember you don’t speak Spanish. The next time you think, “Yeah, that’s the ticket,” please know that it probably isn’t the ticket to anywhere you actually want to go.