Things work the way you make them work

Life has no meaning. Instead, we are the ones who are giving it meaning and have the freedom to give it whatever meaning we want. I want you to have this idea in the back of your mind while you read this article.

The way you live your life right now is what works for you.

If you wake up every morning at 7, make yourself a coffee, and then get ready for work, this is the way things work for you. It would probably be difficult for you not to drink coffee in the morning because, for you, coffee is essential in the first part of the day. That’s how things work for you.

When someone gives you a compliment, if you smile and shy away, avoiding visual contact, that’s the way things work for you. It would probably be difficult for you, when you receive a compliment, to say “thank you, I’m glad you noticed that about me” instead of running away because that’s not how things work for you.

But there are people who don’t drink coffee at all (I’m one of them) or people who manage their emotions when they receive compliments.

All things considered, the idea of this article still stands: things work the way you make them work.

The difference between beliefs and facts

The way we live our lives makes us think that things are the way they are and it’s hard to do something about them. But those things that you consider difficult to change, most of the time, are changeable. And the change doesn’t require too much effort.

The beliefs you have are the ones that are making things work the way they work. But your beliefs are just opinions that you repeated enough times that they eventually reached their higher value: you believe they’re permanent.

Your beliefs are just opinions and nothing more.

Your beliefs are not facts.

We describe as facts those laws of reality that can’t be denied. For example, gravity. You can’t deny gravity. Every time you jump, your body will come back to its initial state, before jumping. Every single time, with no exception.

Instead, your beliefs about how high you or how far you can jump are just opinions. And these opinions can be changed when you change the meaning connected to your beliefs.

Life doesn’t have an inbuilt meaning

Life has no meaning. Life on Earth (and beyond it) has no meaning. Instead, through what we think when we experience something, we give meaning to the things we experience.

All the things we experience have no inbuilt meaning that comes with the experience itself. Instead, the more we live our lives, the more we get to give sense to the experiences we have.

But the way you make sense of your experiences can’t always make sense.

Here’s a personal example.

At the end of 2023, after many years of meditating and trying to make meditation work, I finally got there.

By the end of 2023, the sense I was giving meditation was that it wasn’t working. But, even though it didn’t, I continued trying to find something that works, hoping that eventually I will find something that works for me.

From the end of 2023 until the summer of 2024, meditation started working for me because I found something that seemed to make sense. It helped me regain the energy I lost a while ago and remove impulsivity from my life.

But in the summer of 2024, I took a break until the end of the year, when I tried again to meditate.

This time, meditation didn’t give me any energy anymore. More than that, the more I meditated, the more I was reliving moments from my past that were connected to frustrations I used to have. So I ended up in a process of meditation that was draining my energy – therefore, I thought it didn’t work anymore.

As you can see, I gave different meanings to meditation, but I have one more meaning to share with you.

After weeks of analysis and introspection of the meditation I was doing, I realized that meditation was giving me exactly what I needed, but this time I didn’t need more energy. Instead, I needed to learn how not to react to my past and negative experiences, and meditation was giving me the opportunity to learn exactly that.

Therefore, instead of giving meditation a meaning such as “meditation helps me because it gives me energy” or “meditation doesn’t help me because it drains my energy”, I eventually gave it the following meaning: meditation gives me the things I need.

The connection between beliefs, emotions, and reality

Through the meaning we give to our experiences, we put ourselves in an emotional state that gives weight to our beliefs.

The emotional state we experience is connected to a specific frequency. For example, fear is at 100Hz and love is at 500Hz. I wrote an article about it and I published it recently. You can read it here: Live on the frequency of optimism and be authentic.

Let’s assume you give your experience meaning in such a way that you’re afraid of doing new things. When you do that, you connect to the frequency of 100Hz. But it’s not just you who are connected to that frequency, but absolutely everything related to fears and anxieties.

When you connect yourself to any frequency, you end up attracting into your life other things connected to that frequency.

Thereby, if the meaning you give to your experiences is related to a fear you have and that stops you from doing new things, you’ll attract in your life experiences, people, and objects that will make you give the same meaning to your experiences.

This way, you connect your life to a reality that works for you exactly the way you make it work: by standing far away from doing anything new.

With love and optimism,
David