I Am A Realist

Realism is something that describes me to the core. I’m a hardcore realist and often times people mistake me for being a pessimist or negative. Allow me to explain.

When I was a child, I always saw things for what they were. Starting at around age 10, I can remember that I never understood people who were overly positive or overly happy and I couldn’t understand people who constantly used the word “hope”. It was an odd thing to me, I had always seen the world for exactly what it was, a mess.

I had a decently good childhood, had both parents and had a lot of what I wanted growing up. I enjoyed keeping it simple though when it came to friends and life in general. I can remember that I was a happy kid for the most part. However, when things went wrong, they went truly wrong and I knew immediately that it was the hands I had been dealt. I was always taught to be totally honest and I believe that’s what jump started my realism. I’ve had people say to me “You know there’s a such thing as being too honest” and I never understood that comment and I still don’t.

I’m the kind of person who doesn’t at all believe in sending “positive messages into the universe”. I think it’s an odd thing to do. The universe doesn’t have feelings and it doesn’t understand concepts and therefore, you’re basically talking to a brick wall. I don’t believe in a positive/negative world. I believe that the world is what it is and there’s not “but” to that. As the world continues to get worse, you’ll occasionally find a few people who are good people but, you’ll also find wolves in sheep’s clothing.

I have a really good and sweet friend who’s very positive most of the time and she truly believes that positivity and working towards dreams pays off and I think it’s absolutely wonderful. It’s made her the person that she is that I love so much however, that’s not at all me and so there’s a conflict of interest. I think she’s sort of drifted away from me, the more that she see’s I’m not one of those sending messages into a universe kind of person. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate her input and I believe in a creator, I just don’t feel the need to bother God with my issues.

For some people, Realism is a conclusion that you come to when you’re tired of trying so hard for nothing. When your cards are always stacked against you and you find more crap in life than gold. The majority of the time you’ll find that the best people, the one’s who are always helping others are never being helped back. They are the person who gets called on for every thing and when they need something, you can hear crickets chirping. It’s the easiest way to find out who your friends are. Now, the people are the most arrogant and smug, they are the one’s who have everything in life. They have thousands of people they can turn to for anything and they’re the one’s who don’t appreciate it. Those are also the people who are quick to say they are living the American dream.

I have found that many of those who preach “Hope, Dreams, Prosperity and Positive messages” are the one’s who have been successful for so long, they don’t remember a time they had nothing. They believe in their entire soul that all of that is what got them where they are. When in fact, it’s usually some form of luck, people who basically threw money at you or your dreams or some other form of good card dealing.

In conclusion, Realism is basically knowing your limits and the limits of others, staying grounded (not having your head in the clouds), staying true to your roots and being honest with others and yourself. It doesn’t mean that you’ll never be successful, it means that you’re not expecting it and therefore you won’t be disappointed.

The Generation of Looking Down

With all of the new technologies now and most of them being consolidated onto cell phones, we have become a generation of looking down. I can clearly remember being a kid and going somewhere like the doctors office and running to my room before we left, I had to grab something to keep me busy which ended up being either a coloring book with crayons, a toy or a handheld video game system like my Nintendo Gameboy. Ah those were the days. Now we have a generation of people who carry their smartphones and can do anything they want to keep their self busy.

The older generations who don’t use technology will tell you that our generation is missing out on so much in life. What are we really missing out on though? Not much actually if you think about it because, everything is available to us. What our friends are doing, what news is on TV, what new game is out that everyone is playing, controlling our home alarm system and many other things that can be done on a smartphone. We can even travel the world through Google earth. The great smartphone even gets us out of a boring situation, by having something to distract us. Yes we truly are the generation of looking down.

What did people used to do for entertainment before cell phones became smart? Well, many people spent much more time outside, kids rode their bikes and played a good game of hide and seek or basketball. People had to go home or to a friend’s house to play on a bulky video game system, you had to pull out a camera to take pictures and then have them developed at a store. If you wanted to see what the other side of the world was doing, you would have to spend thousands to travel.

There’s no doubt about it, we all have our heads buried in our smartphones and most of us have our phone’s glued to our hands everywhere we walk. We’ve become so obsessed with our phones we rarely put them in our pockets anymore or leave them laying somewhere and wall hugging to keep that cell phone charged is a way of life.

It’s so important to us as a generation to be liked online. We want the whole world to see our tweets, instagram posts, Facebook statuses, what we’re eating, where we are going, what we are doing and for people to press that like button, reblog, retweet, sharing, commenting and so on. We determine our self worth by what other people, even strangers think of us and some people take it much harder than others. 

If anyone here doesn’t have a smartphone, would you own one and if not, why?

For those of you who do have smartphones, would you ever live without it?