For quite a long time I did not like people. Of course there were the people that I loved and that I had good relationships with. But my general view of humans was negative. People pollute the world, they start wars, they steal, they can commit the most horrible crimes etcetera. But then I read the book Humankind from Rutger Bregman. A life-changer. The main message: all the well-known stories and studies in which humans are bad, are wrong. There are countless studies with interference of results based on unjustified assumptions. Moreover, there are also countless stories to which we do not know the full story. And when you read or look into the full story the underlying idea about the world turns out to be much friendlier. But we usually do not hear the full story. And so biased or wrong(ly interpreted) research feeds into the stories we have about the world and humanity. Stories that are then broadcasted in the media and influence our societal beliefs. Many films are for example based on sensation rather than reality, but they do shape our perception of reality.
During the time that my view of human beings was so negative I found this belief constantly being confirmed. Media outlets such as the daily news, newspapers and social media stories played a big role in this. In the Netherlands in a well-known children's song from 2009 a child sings 'if I were the boss of the daily news, the news would become a lot more positive'. Indeed, good news stories are rarely on the news and bad news is everywhere. It's easy to then (subconsciously) believe that this means there are no good news stories out there. Luckily, there are already some initiatives to make the news more positive. On Instagram for example the accounts @goodnews_movement and @globalpositivenews highlight good news stories around the world.
In recent years I learned that whatever belief you have will be confirmed because our brains constantly look for confirmation of our beliefs. Many will know this as the confirmation bias. The Wikipedia page states that 'Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.' What is great is that once you know this, you can make the world a whole lot brighter very easily! How? Well, by trying to change your belief. This sounds difficult, but with the knowledge that your brain keeps beliefs in tact by looking for confirmation of it maybe it is possible to help our brains.
Last year I started a habit with a friend to keep reminding each other of how adorable and good people can be. We started texting each other when we saw a ‘people are adorable’-moment. For example when a ticket inspector in the train let a child help them inspect the tickets of other passengers. Or when I saw someone walk back from the grocery store, playing with the bag of bread in their hand. By consciously looking for moments that support or confirm the belief that human beings are cute and awesome it became almost impossible to believe otherwise. Moreover, I found that seeking these moments made me feel more connected with other humans even when I did not speak with them. Whenever I see someone swing around a shopping bag or when someone plays with something until it falls, I laugh because I also do that and a lot of humans do that.
I became aware of my previously unjustified beliefs and of the influence such beliefs have on my life (and I am still learning, constantly). And I learned that I could change them. Now I believe that humans are adorable and good. We all like to play and connect with others and we thrive when helping others. I truly believe that. And I see it all around me.
To provide you with some confirmative evidence of this belief I have a video. A few weeks ago I was on a tour in the Cuyabeno jungle in Ecuador. We were in the boat, our guide Jimmy in the front. I took a video and happened to catch an adorable human moment on camera:
(Just for your information, this is the same guide that caught and bare handedly held a piranha for us. On his finger there was still a Band-Aid from a previous cut from a piranha.)
When I showed Jimmy the video later he said he didn’t know what to do. He was lost in his own world for a moment.
It reminded me of a particular moment in Laos. For my internship in 2018 I was on a homestay tea experience somewhere in a very small village in the North. I was there with the initiator of the project, someone we had met and asked along on the way there and our driver. Our driver participated in everything because the village was too far away to drive back and forth in a day. The tea experience consisted of a tour by a woman from the village over the tea plantation and through the process of how they dried and processed the tea leaves.
During a break from the tour we saw women from the town with baskets picking tea leaves. Our guide also gave us a basket to hold for a little bit. Then, from the corner of my eye I saw our driver, a Laotian man from in his 30s, walking around with the basket. With no one around he was moving his hands in the air as to pretend he was picking tea leaves!
Ever since I hold the belief that humans are good and adorable I find more and more situations like this. And it constantly helps shaping my view of human beings further. A collection of these moments and of experiences when I lived in Hawai'i have made me realize that human beings are also playful as long as we allow ourselves. In Hawai'i I have seen people play on the beach, dance freely (through ecstatic dance), and play with fire. I mean, we literally describe doing sports as 'playing a sport', we play games when we are younger and we play games when we are older, ranging from imaginary games to card games to board games to video games. Once this really sunk in I also started putting some pieces together. Since a long time one of my favourite quotes (that my mom has hanging in the toilet and that I mentioned in a previous blogpost) is the following:
We don’t stop playing because we grow up, we grow up because we stop playing. - George Bernard Shaw
Humans are cute and playful and the world can be your playground. But you have to make it that way. The way you experience the world has everything to do with how you interpret what you see and what beliefs you are seeking to confirm. What is going on inside your head, you will experience outside of your head. If you have a negative view of humans, you will only see and hear negative things. But if you have a positive view of humans, you will find the world to be much nicer!
So many of us want to change the world. And so often I have heard that this starts with yourself. But what most of us, including me until recently, don’t realize is that changing the world not only starts with you, it entirely depends on you. Well, at least changing your world. What I mean with this is that you can literally shape the world by changing your perception of it.
I am aware that this idea seems to assume that the world only exists as how we perceive it, or that the world only exists insofar as we experience it. However, I do not necessarily want to agree with this philosophy. There is still a lot of horrible things happening in the world that you cannot undo just by changing your perception of the world. But I do think that if you make your perception of the world better, you will change your attitude and emit a more positive and open energy towards it. And that then positively influences the world around you again. So either way, by changing your beliefs you will change the world, even if it is just a little bit.
Fun exercise: When you wake up explicitly set the intention (out loud) that human beings are awesome, the world is beautiful and good things will happen to you. Or something similar that resonates. Watch your brain find confirmation for it. Let me know how it goes if you want, I am genuinely curious :)Subscribe to my newsletter if you want to stay updated (max. once a week) on my posts, and connect with me on instagram (@iam_allovertheplace) to follow my life as a slow travelling storyteller!
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