Bleeding Edge

When life gives you lemons — just go ahead and squeeze. Squeeze your cheeks until you make a “lemonade.”

Sounds simple enough…

Just do it and stop complaining.

And then we are asked to be Grateful about the lemons that life keeps throwing at our heads too.

I am asked to be grateful for that?

Really now…

All the personal gurus, the life coaches, the new age healers, the hateful angry “Namaste” yoga bitches — all ask you to be Grateful for whatever comes down the pike…

Doesn’t that kinda set a rather low standard?

Even the alcoholics are asked at the AA meetings where they hang out with other hard-core “Alkies” — to be GRATEFUL for the depth of despair that they have fallen down to.

Whatever…

But I think that sometimes instead of being grateful — we gotta erupt in rebellion against the “Fates” and go scream Bloody Murder and unload lest we actually commit murder on the assorted idiots, assholes, and the morons that surround us.

Don’t go quietly into the night. Fight for your Life. Fight like you mean it and maybe you’ll win, or die in bloody honor.

Do that once, and you’ll understand the value of WAR to set you free. Do that twice and you’ll soon come to enjoy it. Do that three times and you’ll be a Warrior.

And guess what?

Only a Warrior wins in this Life of ours. Truly wins that is. Victory doesn’t come to the weaklings, or to the ones who refuse to fight and instead start calling Grateful for the Slavery they have been thrown into.

And if it is the cloudy or the foggy days of London, that makes me think of these things, and refuse to be grateful for whatever bullshit other people throw in my way — so be it.

London sometimes is so Victorian — it’s scary. Prince Harry is finally getting married with a sweet heart that me thinks will ditch him in a fortnight when her tribal instinct rise up against the patriarchy and the white men out there.

Yet for now all of London is festive and depressed at the same time. Happy for Harry and Meghan, and still depressed that we have to pay the Krauts of Berlin, and their Commissars of Brussels, 50 Billion quid, because our lovely aunt Teresa May, wants to make merry with the Fuhrer of Berlin, … Frau Merkel.

And we have to pay for this nonsense of the old gals getting it on together?

Fvck me — this is the London of today. Bowing to Berlin… Sad and lovely, but there you have it. Maybe the Unionists of the Northern Ireland will save our bacon because the Orangemen know how to stand tall…

We need their help because the fight has gone out of the soul of our leaders. Auntie Teresa is more interested to school Mr Trump and shake her fan at him, rather than deal — really deal with terrorism from Berlin, from Brussels, and form the domestic jihadists like those fruitcakes of Allah that we see attacking our Society each and every day.

Yet for a school mark, Teresa is not doing too bad, considering that Thank God she is not Saddiq (Svck-a-dick) Khan who gives aid and comfort to the enemy considering the jihadists like dog poop on the sidewalk — a necessary part of everyday life… Who are these people? Are they some Victorian functionaries who towards the end of the long reign of the Queen, were doing whatever the hell they pleased without much supervision from Parliament or from the old Bird that was more interested in learning Urdu and carrying a white romance with a Muslim from the Raj, rather than dealing with reality. Its like they all are Neo-Victorians, wading in the foggy wetness, and walking in London town amidst the open sewers on the middle of the streets where the housemaids unload the bedpans out of the windows of the first floor and above, from where they toss it onto the unlucky passers-by bellow, who deal with the smog and the gray air and fail to properly protect themselves from the human waste missiles falling atop their head from callous maids — without any regard for the people’s well being, or for their clothes, and dignity, who run shelter-sceter as the brown rain comes down.

This pretty much sums up the situation today with Teresa May and her cabinet playing the role of the Furies, as those chambermaids used to be called… who rained the “Brown Rain” upon the heads of their unsuspecting victims. A bunch of truly Victorian house cleaners and nothing more.

Perhaps that is why, when in London, taking the tube is the best transportation choice going from point A to point B. Walking is for the birds… and those that don’t mind the brown rain coming down with a stench of excrement … and landing the poop on their top coat and hat.

And that is why in the City, everyone has an umbrella handy, always deployed each and every day, even though the rain might not be visible at the moment… Trust the Londoners – the rain will come. At least the brown sort — even when we experience a drought during the middle of Summer…

So, pray – tell: Are you going to be Grateful for that too?

You can tell, the utter lack of sunshine makes me introspective…

Right?

Wrong…

My living in those large dark cities is a personal choice.

A choice that I have always made in order to live, work, and walk on the streets of this intelligent megalopolis with plenty of culture and life, to keep my brain supple and my creative juices flowing.

Yet today London, makes me feel somewhat stressed and perhaps a bit anxious, and antsy, with the constantly rising tempo of the surprisingly complex working of one of my AeroSpace startups and of the World Politics that I invariably delve into and on the other hand, my achieving the impossibly Big Goals of the Big Life I’ve chosen for myself, and the demands of Leadership that were placed upon my shoulders since early age, and weigh on me each and every day of my peripatetic walking life…

So it absolutely makes sense that sometimes as I am feeling a bit out of tune, or un-synced with my London community, family, tribe, and colleagues, and with all of my fellow travelers in this path of Life — I refuse to be grateful for that mess.

A mess that was none of my making, and of which I am not responsible, and it is such a royal mess that makes me feel lonely, disappointed, and disconnected. But certainly it does not make me feel grateful.

Why would I be grateful for that mental slavery that people think proper and correct to throw my way?

Maybe in the past, gratitude was the key they used to lock us away and make us slaves for life. The lovely passive aggressive full of feminine wiles ladies we marry know how to use the guilt trip quite well and they freely use it to send us down the hole to the permanent dog house.

It seems to be happening to everyman today too. It is hard to be a man today. I went to a public seminar that I participated into because I was invited by a TV personality, and because it has a smart title: “What a Man gotta do? How to be a Good Man today.”

And when I showed up it was full of feminists, transgender benders, a couple of Queers and a Lesbian, and they all jumped on me and started judging me as if I were named Harvey Weinstein.

So quite soon, I told all of them, to go stuff themselves and report to duty as Christmas turkeys come BOXING DAY.  Or to put their mitten on and make it a Boxing Day today. Let me tell you — it didn’t go down well.

Soganged up on me and started shrilling and crying as if I had grabbed their “vajajay” and they labelled me a CaveMan, and a Donald Trump. (?)

What’s with that?

And that’s what I am supposed to be grateful for?

Now there are a couple of things about gratitude and me, that need some attention. First off, is that although I have many things to be grateful for, since I can almost always point a finger in a certain direction in time and space and say: There I go but for the Grace of God…”

But that is my religion — it has nothing to do with being grateful for the bollocks that i have been receiving for the last fortnight.

Sure the beggar in the corner of the High Street has it worse, and he is asking for alms — and I give always, and “Thanks be to God” for me not doing that is my normal default response.

But not expressing Gratitude for the beggars being begging. Because although maybe this makes us feel good — it is also WRONG. We need to change the situation so that all children have enough to eat and a bed to sleep with a roof over their head. And if that is not the case — let’s fvckin make it so, but let’;s not be grateful for the shit that we have put so many children into even in a rich city like London town.

Because if we are grateful for all these things — then where is the incentive to change them? Which is where the sickness begins. Gratitude sickness. Gratitude enslavement. Gratitude blindness.

By now — you are probably want to kill me like those transgender LGBTQ crazies and their uber-feminst allies. I get it. Believe you me. I know there’s science about this Gratitude Shit.

Serious scientific SCIENCE. Somewhere out there there are studies and lamas and gurus with electrodes sticking out of their brains and physicians, and physicists, and internet trolls, and all the liberal cannabis smoking establishment like Arianna Huffington and Hillary Clinton, and her Success Coach Toni Robbins, who maybe have done serious experiments, and made equations with calculus, and offered high particle Quantum physics theories, and derivatives and proofs about space and time, and found out that Gratitude makes you happy.

Except it doesn’t.

But You don’t like that answer. You still want Gratitude to solve all your problems and keep you quiet, like some kind of sleeping pill, or the eternal forgetfulness potion, that takes aways your desire to protest…

Think of it in a different way…

What if gratitude is taking away your ambition, and is just making you a SLAVE and worse. What if this New Age BS, called Gratitude is slowly killing you?

It didn’t help Hillary win the White House, now, did it?

Yet, she instead won the Outhouse, and she must be Grateful for that.

Imagine for a moment, if there wasn’t an outhouse in the woods for her and Billy to cram together and take a pee, or whatever they do as Power Couple — the woods would be full of the proverbial Brown Rain…

Now seriously — think about that.

Surely, there are worse things that can happen to you than losing an election, as this Japanese politician found out swiftly, when the sharp blade of the katana sword came in contact with his abdomen.

He must be thinking now how Grateful he was to win the elections?

Or maybe that it might have been better to have lost the elections and to have lived…

What if gratitude is keeping You slave to your inadequacies, to your desperate straits, by keeping you chained to your current circumstances?

Do You think the President is grateful for the stupid BS he has to put up with?

If I know The Donald — he unleashes the furies of Hell to all those soul sucking idiots out there, who make his life worse and make his decisions for the country more difficult.

Do you think he is Happily Grateful for the morons of Congress who are the perfect swamp creatures and want to keep things as they are?

And should we be grateful for the shit that sometimes causes us to fall off the expectations ladder, and feel deeply unhappy, and maybe even a little disappointed with the miracle of Life, family, friends, work and community that surrounds us.

Of course Not.

And there are remedies for all that — especially if you choose to not be grateful for all the things that don’t fit you anymore. Because only when you are Un-grateful, You an start breathing free all over again and you can start fighting and trying harder to change things and declare that this LIFE is the WAR you have to fight for yourself.

Ad maybe Yoga, Meditation, Love, Work, Thankfulness, and Spiritual grounding — all help. But methinks that fighting for you rights is what does it.

And maybe going to church solves most all of that, but there are some different solutions out there too… and those take WAR and FIGHTING to get through to the other side.

And it has got to be true because even the ancient people thought that something entirely different might fix all of that psychological bubble, the mental fugue, the fog of despair, and the constant soul malaise, that many members of our Society experience on a daily basis…

And this might help the fog that i have been in that resembles the strong single malt whisky fueled Jetlag that I have been suffering through the last 24 hrs or so…

Would you believe me if I said,WAR is the father of us all?

Would you care that I state that an old fashioned BLOODY WAR, can cure all of that soul fog? And that it would do it rather swiftly?

Yes, thought so…

Let’s examine the evidence…

The positive effects of war on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped. Psychiatric wards in Paris were strangely empty during both world wars, and that remained true even as the German army rolled into the city in 1940. Researchers documented a similar phenomenon during civil wars in Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. An Irish psychologist named H. A. Lyons found that suicide rates in Belfast dropped 50 percent during the riots of 1969 and 1970, and homicide and other violent crimes also went down. Depression rates for both men and women declined abruptly during that period, with men experiencing the most extreme drop in the most violent districts. County Derry, on the other hand — which suffered almost no violence at all — saw male depression rates rise, rather than fall.

So, in short — war is good for you.

Holly Cow… what a revelation. Let me go start little war so that we can all feel better. Is that why bar fights that we survived and didn’t get arrested by the Police seem so much better in retrospect?

Hold on a second, don’t start the email and internet flaming war against me, just yet — because I’m not suggesting starting a war as a solution to our emotional ills…

But if there is a WAR going on — take the opportunity to enjoy it. Don’t waste a good crisis. Be grateful for it. Thrive within it and declare “I’m with Her” and bite the bullet…

Fight fire with fire.

But, that being said …

WAR?

What the fvck is going on here?

Wars are supposed to be bad.

Right?

But if WAR is bad — then why are people feeling less depressed, less crazy, less violent and less suicidal, when something we can all agree is bloody awful, horrible life loss, full of civilian collateral damage, and is the kind of thing that you try to keep your children aways from, while it is threatening to snatch the life force from all of us?

Maybe because war and natural disasters force people to unite together.

War forces you to help yourself and all others around you. Assuming you are a Good person — you will step up and help others and be helped out too. Maybe because during the time of war we all act as a community.

And if you survive the War — you cannot but feel special. And that maybe is akin to coming close to be feeling grateful for being alive, as I do…

As a matter of fact, the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 1979 put it this way: “When people are actively engaged in a cause of great magnitude, their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health. It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.”

We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding–“tribes.” This tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival.

Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin lamented that English settlers were constantly fleeing over to the Indians-but Indians almost never did the same. Tribal society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a communal species. The most recent example of that attraction is combat veterans who come home to find themselves missing the incredibly intimate bonds of platoon life. The loss of closeness that comes at the end of deployment may explain the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by military veterans today.

Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, we explore what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. It explains the irony that-for many veterans as well as civilians-war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. This might explain why we are stronger when we come together, and how that can be achieved even in today’s divided world.

Friendship is a good thing. That’s hardly front-page news — but somehow we all forget how important it is.

We take friends for granted. As we raise families we neglect friends. We don’t put in the effort to make and keep friends. And the problem is growing. In 1985 most people said they had 3 close friends. In 2004 the most common number was zero.

In a survey given in 1985, people were asked to list their friends in response to the question “Over the last six months, who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?” The most common number of friends listed was three; 59 percent of respondents listed three or more friends fitting this description. The same survey was given again in 2004. This time the most common number of friends was zero. And only 37 percent of respondents listed three or more friends. Back in 1985, only 10 percent indicated that they had zero confidants. In 2004, this number skyrocketed to 25 percent. One out of every four of us is walking around with no one to share our lives with.

This is sad, and for more reasons than you might expect. We need friends to keep us healthy. Lack of social support predicts all causes of death.

Having few friends is more dangerous than obesity and is the equivalent health risk of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Indeed, it might appear that we need a community to feel good. And community is something we sorely lack in the modern world because all of our technology and top down force feeding of information, causes vast disconnecting and separation as the social bonds are severed in favor of Facebook likes and dislikes. Sadly, Facebook friends are not real friends but a digital simulacrum, of the actual true friendship, and yet we often make that mistake and mistaken the simulation for real. And then we feel the negative effects of it, on those days when we are somewhat forced to be truly introspective in the few quiet moments we snatch between the barrage of the constant noise and information overload. Modern digital millennial society has perfected the art of making people feel that community is not necessary, and family does not matter, tribe does not exist, and perhaps we are all unnecessary to each other as well…

It smacks of a well designed dystopia, and it causes many of us to not only live alone, but to feel utterly alone and perhaps in many cases lonely. Because we are often surrounded by strangers rather than family or friends — we take it as the new normal and the oppressive nature of Facebook communication masks our true desire for Communities of Purpose. And here comes war that pits all of us together fighting towards a common aim. This disruption s monumental and we are truly blessed when we feel the company of other men at the war front, because surviving and winning is all that matters. Everything else pales by comparison. The primal needs take over and all psychobabble goes out the window.

But in normal life, we communicate by text rather than using voice, or attempting a face to face meeting. We hire a service instead of getting the help of a buddy. We have virtual sex with porn helpers over the Internet, instead of attempting and keeping real sexual and fulfilling relationships.

These are all new developments in the existence of the Homo Sapiens, and not all of them are bad. But all of them are disconcerting and disconnecting. And while efficient and effective, these digital tools, don’t contribute to the feeling of community we all need in order to feel whole.

So it’s no surprise that empathy is dropping fast amongst the Millennials and those always behind their small screens that rule their lives… and maybe that is why we need a WAR to get these fast becoming transgender Millennials getting some sense and manning up all over again. Men and Women that is…

A recent study at the University of Michigan revealed a dramatic decline in empathy levels among young Americans between 1980 and today, with the steepest drop being in the last ten years. The researchers, claim that the shift in behaviors is in part due to more people living alone and spending less time engaged in social and community activities that nurture empathetic sensitivity.

And of course we all know that when you feel like you don’t belong to a group — your health, your well-being, and even your self-control plummet. If that doesn’t register with you maybe that’s because when you feel disconnected, your IQ drops too…

When people’s sense of social connectedness is threatened, their ability to self-regulate suffers; for instance their IQ performance drops. Feeling lonely predicts early death as much as major health risk behaviors like smoking and drinking or eating to excess.

I know what some people are thinking … But I have friends. Got a bunch of them, actually.

That isn’t the issue.

We’re talking about a community. A group. A band of brothers. A syndicate of sisters. Your fantasy football league. Your sewing circle. Your syndicate. Your cartel. Your platoon, your posse. Your wing-men and your wing-girls…

Those ready to die for you.

Or at least take a bullet for you as a friend…

Get my drift?

But they’re all relationships, right?

Maybe the difference isn’t clear.

So what’s the difference?

Well, I’m glad you asked…

It’s all about going to church.

And also it is about not being a Conformist like the moffos bellow.

No real man or real woman would get caught dead in the Nazi Thanksgiving celebrations…

But the 99% of the Germans were all with Hillary Clinton of their time. The fvckin Nazi bastard Adolf Hitler, that Hillary still channels today…

And which country was the only European country that although occupied by the German Nazis — still managed to save her Jews by spiriting them away to Sweden in the middle of the night.

And the reflection of their being fighters and denying the German Murderers their prey reverberates to this day.

And today research shows Denmark is still home to the happiest people in the world.

And methinks that the fact that these people were real fighters against the NAZIs and didn’t just surrendered but first helped their Jews escape and then allowed the NAZI criminal war machine to come inside their country — still gives them happiness today.

And it helps the children of those second world war generation, and it’s not just the ones that belong to a church community.

The Danes are uncomfortably HAPPY. And the only other group of people that get that high on the HAPPINESS Index are pretty much all the religious people who are happier than the agnostics, than the anti-God brigades, and than the non-religious folks. Their happiness is clearly due to being in a community as 92% of Danes are also today part of some kind of church group, and are maintaining their status as being the happiest people in the world.

The sociologist Ruut Veenhoven and his team have collected happiness data from ninety-one countries, representing two-thirds of the world’s population. He has concluded that Denmark is home to the happiest people in the world, with Switzerland close behind… Interestingly enough, one of the more detailed points of the research found that 92 percent of the people in Denmark are members of a church and also some sort of group, ranging from church choirs, and sports groups, to cultural interests, or language learning and group traveling groups.

And these are only the measurable and visible happiness effects of religion, yet we find evidence that other private or subjective aspects of religiosity also affect life satisfaction independent of attendance and congregational friendship.

Most of the happiness benefit from faith comes from the socializing associated with religious attendance:

Although the positive association between religiosity and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how religion actually shapes life satisfaction. Using a new panel dataset, this study offers strong evidence for social and participatory mechanisms shaping religion’s impact on life satisfaction. Our findings suggest that religious people are more satisfied with their lives because they regularly attend religious services and build social networks in their congregations. The effect of within-congregation friendship is contingent, however, on the presence of a strong religious identity. We find little evidence that other private or subjective aspects of religiosity affect life satisfaction independent of attendance and congregational friendship.

Membership has its privileges and we ain’t just talking about smiles. Seems like everybody is yakking about “grit” these days. Apparently, the subject of grit promotes grit, but only when it comes to walking the talk about grit — and not just talking about it.

What promotes resilience?

Groups.

Belonging to groups, such as networks of friends, family, clubs and sport teams, improves mental health because groups provide support, help you to feel good about yourself and keep you active. But belonging to many different groups might also help to make you psychologically and physically stronger. People with multiple group memberships cope better when faced with stressful situations such as recovering from stroke and are even more likely to stay cold-free when exposed to the cold virus.

Being a part of many different social groups can improve mental health and help a person cope with stressful events. It also leads to better physical health, making you more able to withstand — and recover faster from — physical challenges, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Belonging to groups, such as networks of friends, family, clubs and sport teams, improves mental health because groups provide support, help you to feel good about yourself and keep you active. But belonging to many different groups might also help to make you psychologically and physically stronger. People with multiple group memberships cope better when faced with stressful situations such as recovering from stroke and are even more likely to stay cold-free when exposed to the cold virus.

And if happiness and resilience aren’t enough for you, let’s talk about the ever-popular benefit of not dropping dead, because as Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, did a meta-analysis of 148 longevity and well being studies — she concluded that a lack of social support predicts all causes of death. People with a solid group of friends are 50 percent more likely to survive at any given time than those without one.

Okay, groups are good — to say the least. But maybe the local bowling league doesn’t seem that appealing…

So how do you start your own little community? What’s it take to form a group of friends and get all those wonderful benefits? Here’s what the research says:

Arrange Regular Meetings, because same as drinking Kool-Aid once, does not make you an astronaut, so it is that one get-together is not a community building, but it is a party.

If you don’t have regular, consistent meetings, the thing is probably going to fall apart and you certainly won’t get the bonding, trust and all them good “feels” that you’re wanting.

Two of the biggest boosters to overall well-being are exercise and religious attendance. It’s because both give consistent, scheduled benefits:

We suggest that while major events may not provide lasting increases in well-being, certain seemingly minor events – such as attending religious services or exercising – may do so by providing small but frequent boosts soul warming thrusts. It follows that if people engage in such behaviors with sufficient frequency, they may cumulatively experience enough boosts to attain higher well-being.

It’s like having a few extra engines in your airplane… and a few extra wheels to drive it around the grounds when not in the mood for flying…

It’s comical when you think about it.

We have set work hours, but no time for anything soul liberating.

We schedule our hair appointments with the rigors of the NAZI party, and the Gestapo gets scheduled in our lives but not the party time. So often, when it comes to relationships, you know, that one thing that pretty much every variety of religion, philosophy, and scientific psychological or mental health discipline all agree with — is that it makes life worthwhile — and yet that’s the one area where, we just kinda wing it…

Does that make any kind of sense?

Priorities, people … priorities.

You want datapoints?

Seeing friends and family regularly, is the equivalent of making an extra $199,000 per year:

So, an individual who only sees his or her friends, or relatives, less than once a month or never at all, would require around an extra £99,000 a year to be just as satisfied with life as an individual who sees his or her friends or relatives on most days.

So make a plan. Set a schedule. Once a week, once a month, whatever. But consistency is key.

Okay, you’ve got a schedule. But who is coming?

Time to play recruiter. For a solid group, what kind of people do you want to invite?
First try to invite all those who makes you feel good, and follow it up with those whom you admire.

You want people who make you feel good. Yeah, I know. Obvious. But it’s worth repeating.

You know why old people are so happy and mellow? The research shows it’s because they’ve deliberately pruned their social circles over the years:

Other studies have discovered that as people age, they seek out situations that will lift their moods — for instance, pruning social circles of friends or acquaintances who might bring them down.

Often times we include people because we “should” and this can lead to problems. Spending time with fake friends — or “frenemies” — is worse than spending time with real enemies:

Friends that we feel ambivalently about raise our blood pressure more — cause more anxiety and stress — than people we actively dislike.

And you want to have people in the clan who you admire. People you aspire to be like. Because you are going to become similar to the people around you — like it or not.

The Longevity Project, which studied over 1000 people from youth to death had this to say:

The groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become. For people who want improved health, association with other healthy people is usually the strongest and most direct path of change.

When you take a job take a long look at the people you’re going to be working with — because the odds are you’re going to become like them, they are not going to become like you.

Who do you like and who do you look up to? Who do you trust to watch your back? That’s who. That’s your platoon. That’s your squad.

Alright, we know you want to be surrounded by people you want to be like, and people you feel good around.

So what’s the next step?

Fight together, struggle, help, and celebrate together.

So what’s your group gonna do?

Hopefully something you all enjoy. But if you want to accelerate the bonding process, make it something with a touch of struggle to it. A bloody war will not do for a weekend holiday, but an excursion with guns at the paintball park will do…

Sports, games, volunteer work, or building something all qualify. I’m not saying you all have to get together to build Noah’s Ark … but it’s not a terrible idea, either. Do get started with something smaller, interactive, and perhaps with a bit of struggle in it, just to give the participants, a communal sense of accomplishment.

Anthropologists found that groups that went through “high-ordeals” bonded far more than those that went through “low-ordeals.” Struggling together made people closer. This is why fraternities haze. Why soldiers feel like they are kin. And why we feel the divine spirit within the church.

Communitas. Yes is the right word. Community with us. Community is a Latin word that means coming together bearing gifts and it still holds true today. That is why Communitas, is the best descriptor of what I am trying to teach you here.

Because helping each other builds Community. And Humans thrive with Community, but not alone.

Communitas, also fulfills the other axiom of why we get together. You and I both want to surrounded ourselves with people we admire, and respect.

Because maybe we think that they’re gonna rub off some of their Greatness on us. But there’s almost always a way for us to give back and bring value to their lives as well. And that is Communitas… And there is an American anthropologist that has written a book about it — except that her name escapes me right now…

And this lady is like a hundred years old and this may surprise you but the people who live the longest aren’t the ones who receive the most help — they’re the people who give the most help, and make sure to belong to strong community, as this lady has done all her life.

Beyond the size of our physical and not the “fakebook” type of digital social networks, the clearest benefit of social relationships comes from helping others to live and go on. Those who helped their friends and neighbors, by advising and caring for others, tended to live the longest towards their advanced old age.

And after the struggle, after you’ve given and received help, you must rest and go out to celebrate your success. It’s no big shocker, but leading happiness researchers have shown that sharing our achievements with others and celebrating with others — definitely boosts our sense of well-being, and our overall health…

Sharing successes and accomplishments with others has been shown to be associated with elevated pleasant emotions and well-being. So, when you or your spouse or cousin or best friend wins an honor, congratulate him, or her, and yourself, and celebrate.

Okay, we’ve covered a lot on what your little group needs to survive and thrive. Let’s round it up and see how this plays out in the long term…

To Sum it all up, be bullish on the future and a bear with your past. Work hard and play hard. Help all others, and remember the hadn’t that gives the rose retains the perfume…

Don’t be afraid to be a Contrarian.

You can build a great group by consistent get-togethers, because by leaving happiness to chance — you might find this is an excellent way to be unhappy. If you can make a dentist appointment, you can also make an appointment to enjoy “Game of Thrones” or “Game of Cards” together with friends, each and every week.

Recruit people you like and people you look up to: If you don’t like anyone and think everyone is beneath you, create an Antisocial Narcissists Club. Nobody will come but everyone will think they deserve to be the leader.
Struggle, Help, and Celebrate: Build or make something. Engage in friendly competition. Help each other. And when you succeed, party like rockstars.
Nobody wants deathbed regrets and everyone would like a good life.

When people are dying, what do they regret the most? Coming in at #4 is: “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” A group is a way to solve the problem efficiently and on a consistent basis. Oh, and it’s a lot of freakin’ fun.

How do you live a good life?

Well, The Grant Study has followed a group of 268 men for over 80 years. They have learned a lot about what does and doesn’t make for a good life. When the lead researcher was asked “What have you learned from the Grant Study?”

His response was: “Keep in mind that the only things that really matter in life, are your relationships to other people.”

Great study…

Yours,
Dr Churchill

PS:

This landmark study – which Dr. Andrew Weil (New Age guru) calls “a remarkable achievement with surprising conclusions” upends the advice we have been told about how to live to a healthy old age, or about gratefulness, or about all that other psycho bubble out there from the likes of Tony Robbins and his ilk of nutcrackers.

We have been given a bag of lies.

Because we have been told that the key to longevity involves obsessing over what we eat, how much we stress, and how fast we run.

But based on the most extensive study of longevity ever conducted, “The Longevity Project” exposes what really impacts our lifespan — and this is to not forget to include a healthy dose of friends, family, personality, special interests, hobbies, passions, projects, and work communities, into our life.

Gathering new information and using modern statistics to study participants across eight decades, Dr. Howard Friedman and Dr. Leslie Martin bust all the popular “New Age” myths about achieving a healthy long life.

For example, people do not die from working long hours at a challenging job – many who worked the hardest lived the longest. Getting and staying married is not the magic ticket to long life, especially if you’re a woman. And it’s not the “happy-go-lucky” ones who thrive. Instead, it is the social butterflies, the imprudent partiers, and the persistent socializers, who flourish through the years.

So if you are heading on the longevity spectrum and need some good advice about how to stay healthy and live longer — go out and find some new friends and ask them about it. Regardless of their advise — You’ll at least have the Community that will surround you so that you can live longer…

This is a game changer, because it changes the conversation about how to go about living a long & healthy life.

So make a plan to get together regularly with your family, your community, your tribe, and with your crazy friends — because waiting for the next war to enlist, and fight in order to feel good about yourself, is just a cop-out and maybe it would be the laziest way to die.

Do that, or go die by a self inflicted wound.