Power Ball

Life events that give you insight into the world around you...

Photo by Alejandro Garay on Unsplash

No. I did not win the power ball, that is not what this post is about. Anyone looking for investment, or for a loan, nuts to you.

Anyway, some poor person in California bought the winning power ball ticket, and they are the only one that had the winning numbers. That sucks. You might think that there is a lot of money to be made on that win, and you’re right, there is. Nearly a billion dollars when all is said and done. Many people are very envious of that person who won, but they shouldn’t be. This post is about what they do not know, but what they are about to find out. What they think that they know about the world is about to dramatically shift, especially with those that they think that they know the best.

Let me ask you something. Think about the people around you. The people that you have known for years, the people that you grew up with, your family, those that know you better than anyone. Do you have them in your mind? Good. Now, with some of you, this is a lot of people, and for others, there are fewer. I would guess your level of trust and closeness varies with the people that you imagined, but for those that you consider true friends, I would bet that you think that you know them.

In fairness, you do, but you know them in the circumstances that are currently present. You are familiar with one another with your shared life circumstances, but when those circumstances change, people can change in dramatic ways that you do not comprehend.

The person that possesses that ticket is about to find this out. Perhaps they are a more intelligent person like this one:

This person understood that if people knew that he won a fair amount of money, they would want to be his best friend. In a lot of places you have to do the photo ops, and in others, you cannot be anonymous when you win. I think that this is nonsense, but this isn’t about what I think.

A lot of people have no concept of how to handle a lot of money, I think that all of us understand that, as there are numerous lottery winners that are more financially destitute after the win than prior to it, but there is another aspect to something like this, and that is the people.

Of course, you are going to have a thousand people claim to be your relative and show up with your hand out. You are going to have people try to take advantage, ask for investments, and loans, and give you sob stories, but some of the people closest to you will turn you into a villain.

Why?

Well, for a lot of reasons I suppose. You can chalk it up to jealousy, and that’s certainly true. Many people will be jealous, but this is something different. There is a phenomenon when a person has a sudden success or life event that turns friends into enemies overnight.

This sort of thinking comes from a person that wants to level you, they are jealous of you, they would like some notoriety for themselves and see you as an avenue to get it, and also has shifted their focus that defines you in their eyes. This is something that humans have a habit of doing in many circumstances, especially relationships, and I can give you a little demonstration of it right now. In this situation, it is the shift in circumstances that will make friends shift their focus. Some will see the winner as a bank, some won’t change at all, and some will want to destroy the other person.

With this set of people, it is that they have shifted their focus. They used to see the winner as having thirty good things about them, and maybe two or three bad. Now, all the positive has been discarded and all the negative grows in volume. The power ball winner, much like many people that become overnight celebrities, is about to find out that the people around them are going to start viewing them in a drastically different way, and often not to the winner’s benefit. They likely are about to be very lonely.

Let’s go with another example.

Have you ever noticed cell phone towers? They are pretty common, but people tend to not even notice them. If you see one, and you ask the person with you to look over in the direction that it is, and describe what they see, they likely won’t even mention it. If you say, what about the tower, they may respond with confusion. What tower? If you directly point it out, and tell them what they are missing, suddenly it comes into view. They can see what they couldn’t before.

Our brains are very good at defining reality. They are very good at telling you what is there, all the while, filtering out information that it doesn’t see as relevant to the situation. This is a reasonable and good thing for our brains to do. Otherwise, it would be preoccupied with too much information. However, it means that it is removing information that is still there, but you don’t process it, like the cell tower. The tower was always there, but it took directing attention to it for the brain to acknowledge its presence.

We do this very same thing with people. A good example with other humans is when you meet someone that you have a strong attraction to, but other people don’t seem to like them. You might find their disinterest rather dismissive, or they may actually try to warn you off this person, which you find insulting to your new interest and to your taste in people.

However, after some time with this person, you find that they are full of problems and you are absolutely miserable. When the relationship ends you see all the things that people tried to tell you about in the beginning, and all those events that supported their perspective come sharply into focus. They were there all the time, you just couldn’t see it…until now.

If you have been reading me for any length of time, you know I like the series Bioshock a great deal. In the third one, Bioshock Infinite, there is a very complex storyline that has to do with different realities, and the idea of the mulitverse. When you play through the conclusion of the game, after the last fight, there is this incredible walk through the multiverse and to the final reveal of the game, which I won’t spoil.

Booker and Elizabeth, the two characters that you follow, come to a place that is a sea of stars:

but they aren’t stars, they only appear that way to Booker. In reality, it is a see of doors:

Elizabeth: Thousands of doors... opening all at once. My God! They are beautiful!

Booker DeWitt: What? The stars?

Elizabeth: Not stars. They're doors.

Booker DeWitt: Doors to...

Elizabeth: To everywhere. All that's left is the choosing.

They always were to Elizabeth, but Booker had no idea until Elizabeth showed him. Later, they come to a door that Elizabeth thought would be unlocked, and when it wasn’t she was confused and disappointed. She tried to pick the lock, but she isn’t able to, and there is no key anywhere to be seen.

Booker: Are you going to open it?

Elizabeth: No. It’s no good. Damn it. I thought once we were here. I could fully control it… I thought…

Booker: What is that?

Elizabeth: It’s a key

Booker: Where did it come from?

Elizabeth: It’s always been there… I just… I just couldn’t see it…

This is a perfect illustration of what exists but cannot be seen by our brain at the time. Our world is built on our impressions and the information that our minds have deemed necessary. It is only when there is cause for a shift in focus that we will be able to see things that were always there.

I mentioned how people do this in relationships after they go bad, but they also do this and cause them to go in that direction.

People meet someone, and they fall madly in love with them. All those little things that they think are so very cute are what keeps them up at night in utter glee and bliss just thinking about that person.

They love the way they laugh with that little hitch at the end.

They love the way that they pout when they don’t get their way.

They love the way they snore, just a little bit.

Fast forward five years and every single one of these things has gone from something endearing to something infuriating. It isn’t because the person changed, it is because their focus has. Their mate annoys them, and so everything that they do is now framed in that light. What used to be thought of in a positive light, shifts to a negative one because that is the mindset that they view their spouse in. What they are focused on has been altered.

There is this website that someone told me about that had a confessional on it where people more or less complained incessantly about their mates. This was such a common theme that they found everything about that person annoying and homicide thought-inducing.

Now, there is a great deal of evidence that if you are female, thinking about getting married, and are taking birth control, you need to stop taking it for many months prior to going through with that commitment. The hormones that the pill changes in the body will shift who you are attracted to. It holds you in a specific phase of your cycle where you will mate select incorrectly. You will select someone that you are not genetically compatible with.

I am putting this in here as a caveat to the rest of the post, as a lot of women do not follow this advice, get married, go off the pill so they can have children, and find out that they absolutely despise the person that they are married to. This is unfortunately common, and it will blow up a marriage. Everything that person does will make you want to murder them, or at the very least excise them from your life with extreme prejudice.

However, that is not the only reason that this change happens. A lot of it comes from mates that do not see each other the same way and allow all the things that they loved about that person to be sullied beyond repair. When what you focus on and what you notice changes, so does your thought process about that other person.

Our brains are amazing things. They filter out things that need to be filtered for our own good, but that missing information can blindside us later on when it suddenly becomes relevant.

I imagine that it is quite difficult to be hit in the face with the reality that all the things that you were warned about weren’t people’s imaginations, and that they genuinely were trying to help you before you got in too deep with a terrible partner.

I also imagine that it would be terrifying to realize that your partner’s cute way of showing you how strongly they felt about you by being jealous was in fact a very loud red flag that they are an abusive ass that you now don’t know how to get away from.

There is a lot of information around you, and what you pay attention to is often going to be what makes you feel safe or gives you the outcome that you want. It is why it is important to hear the perspectives of those around you, as they may be seeing information that your brain is filtering out. You have no idea what you aren’t seeing that has always been there.