What if Nothing is Actually Going Wrong?

You awake with a headache. You should have gone to sleep earlier last night, you think to yourself. Next to you lies your sleeping partner. It's been months since you've been intimate. Things are so different to how they used to be. You feel like you failed to be the man she wants you to be. Clumsily, you get dressed. Everything feels hard because of your anxiety. You trudge grumpily into the bathroom. No more toothpaste. Today is just not your day. As you eat breakfast, You listen to a podcast about the cost of living crisis. Nothing is affordable anymore. Your generation is screwed. You jump onto the first Zoom call of the day. The meeting goes poorly. You spill coffee on yourself as you get up. Your work feels meaningless. You feel like you're bad at everything. When you finish, you scroll on your phone. You watch a few videos from the influencers that you follow who hammer on about a corrupt new government program that was just signed into law. It's going to be raining all week. You turn on a stream to watch the team you support play. They lose. Of course they lost. They always lose when you watch them play. Dinner was forgettable. More scrolling. You collapse into bed. It's been a shitty day. Another shit. Humans are a storytelling species. We tell each other stories to make sense of the world around us. The stories that shape your life are the ones that live inside your head. Paranoia is from ancient Greek. Noia. is from nous, which means mind, but not just the mind. It's a rich word that encompasses perception, intellect, understanding. It is the mind's orientation towards reality. Aristotle treated nous as the highest part of the soul, the part capable of grasping truth directly. Para, meaning beside, alongside, against, contrary to. In paranoia, it carries a sense of deviation, the mind beside itself, thinking gone wrong. An unwarranted or delusional belief that you are being persecuted, harassed, or betrayed by others. Without realizing it, this is a way of navigating life that is quite easy to fall into. There are plenty of stories to go around on the internet or from the people around you that will tell you that you are living in a world that is conspiring against you. In essence, at the center of your story, there is one constant. You are a victim. Life is happening to you, not simply happening. The genius of the victim narrative is just how seductive it is. We are the only animal that repeatedly foretells the end of the world. We anticipate danger when often it is not there at all. We anticipate things that never come to be and then believe that anticipation is what saved us. All of us are not only capable of paranoia, but spend much of our lives indulging in it. in the form of drama and hysteria and worrying. If your identity is built on a series of stories within which you are always a victim, you are constructing the walls of your own prison. This is one way to live. It is not the only way. What happens when you grow tired of this way of operating? When you begin to notice that the dinner table conversations about what is wrong with the world are circular, reading angry comments on online posts or in forums, letting the people that shout the loudest shape your own ideas. I should have done this, if only I had that. Is this how you want to live? This is not fulfilling. Something deeper inside of you feels the tragic limitations that you are placing on yourself. What if we could hold our own stories a little more lightly? Meta, meaning after, beyond, with, between, and crucially, change or transformation. Metanoia is a mind changed, a mind gone beyond its previous state. It denotes a shift in an individual's perception of self, others, or life itself, typically involving disintegration of an old identity followed by the emergence of a reorganized, more integrated self. In the words of R.D. Lange, is a natural process through which a person may go in order to achieve a greater degree of sanity. Precisely at the moment of collapse, when things are falling apart, when it all seems hopeless, there is an opportunity, a doorway into a whole different manner of operating. An old version of you has to die to make space for a new you. Why does one even gravitate to paranoia at all? It is a diminished way to live. but far less terrifying than facing the prospect that you are actually not a victim at all. Because it doesn't require taking full responsibility for yourself. Because embracing radical change and the death of who you used to be requires stepping into the unknown. If it's someone else's fault, I don't have to own my own emotions, my own reactions, my own experience of life itself. But there is a freedom and a joy and an expansiveness to owning what you feel. What comes after that? The thing I think we all secretly want to become, if we have the courage to take the next step. Pronoia is the antidote to paranoia. But before I continue, I want to take a moment to say that this video essay has been a big leap into the unknown for me. And it's only been possible thanks to the sponsor of this video, Shopify, whose support is what has allowed me to invest weeks of time and thousands of dollars into the writing, planning, and these are looking so good. and shooting of both the stop animation and non-stop animation elements of this video. Shopify is for people interested in starting or growing a business. This in itself can be a big step into the unknown. And while it can feel scary, I have always found this to be the best way to develop greater autonomy in my life. And I've also seen Shopify empower people in my life to build their own businesses, like my mom. who has sold her incredible jewelry this way. They make it easier to take that leap by providing a powerful set of tools that offer insights into where and how your customers shop, tools to connect with social media, and ways to manage your operations as they grow. If you've been thinking about building something of your own, you can start a free trial by going to www.shopify.com slash Nathaniel Drew or scanning the QR code on screen. Thank you Shopify for making this video possible. This is awesome. Pronoia, an alternative to paranoia. Something tells me that life itself goes beyond even our best told stories into the realm of mystery, of non-story, the non-story of pure consciousness. An enlightened way to live would be to have no internal story, to be fully present all the time. All that really exists is right now. I'm just not there yet. I'm learning how to be more and more present, but I still get caught up in my stories. Like I said, humans are a storytelling species. It's what we do. I'm not prepared to let go of all the stories I tell myself. But if I'm going to have a story about myself, I can at the very least make it one in which I am not a victim. Pro, meaning for, on behalf of, in favor of. The mind perceiving a world arranged for you instead of a world arranged against you. What if the world is secretly conspiring in your favor? Not to get you whatever you want, not to become anything that you want, but to help you grow, to help you wake up, to become everything that you are ultimately meant to be. Better yet, what if the world is simply helping you rediscover what you always were? Your true nature. You begin to reject the idea of pointing the finger at someone else or something else for your own unhappiness. Just like anything, pronoia must be delicately held lest you fall into magical thinking. Just because you think things will work out does not mean in any way that they will work out how you imagined or how you want. It doesn't mean there won't be pain and conflict and struggle and fear and doubt along the way. All of these things remain integral pieces of our lives. You cannot suddenly be the king or queen of England just because you think it. It is simply a belief, a trusting, that life knows what is best for you. Anything you gain, you are meant to gain. Anything you lose, you are meant to lose. You are on a grand journey to see beyond your own delusions. It also doesn't mean life is to be lived passively. To even engage with this way of operating is to stand against how most people think and operate. Some will perceive it as a threat because you are no longer feeding into their story themselves. To live this way, you first have to notice all paranoia as it arises. And then comes the hard part. A lifetime of catching whenever it starts to creep into your own mind. You have the autonomy and power to not feed into the things that you find self-destructive. You cannot control what happens, but you can control how you react to it. The beauty of this worldview is both trusting that life will take you where you are supposed to go, and also taking ownership of your actions and reactions. You are an active architect of your life. You awake with a headache. This is not a pleasant way to start the day. But then you take a moment to just lie there in bed. Your body is asking you for more rest. It's been asking for a while now. Tonight, you won't go out drinking. Next to you lies your sleeping partner. It has been months since you've been intimate. Something is off, but you've been avoiding it, and you realize you can always ask. Something occurs to you this morning. You can change how you react to situations that don't go how you like. You get up and walk to the bathroom. No more toothpaste, but you can grab some more later today. At breakfast, you start listening to a podcast about the dopamine addiction crisis, but then you turn it off and eat quietly instead. You jump onto the first Zoom call of the day. The meeting doesn't go great, and you spill coffee on yourself again for the second day running. But then you crack a joke about it, and everyone laughs, breaking the ice. What else is there to do? You don't find meaning in your work, but you resolve to do something about it. You send an email to your boss letting them know that you'd like to move on to your own projects at the end of the quarter. You finish work. Your mind is buzzing with possibilities because of your decision, so instead of scrolling, you go on a walk. It begins to rain and the forecast says it will be doing so all week. But you like the rain. And more poignantly, it feels like it's washing away who you used to be.

You can start your own free trial right now by going to: https://www.shopify.com/nathanieldrew

Read or listen to the full essay that goes with this piece here → https://nathanieldrew.substack.com/p/pronoia-what-if-the-entire-world

My mom's website (if you want to know more about her incredible jewelry) → https://www.atelier363.com

My blog/newsletter → https://nathanieldrew.substack.com/
Second Channel → https://www.youtube.com/@nobackupplan
Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/nathanieldrew_/

Thank you to Owen Ragland for the incredible music composition & Lucas Meisl for help shooting and editing this piece!

Timestamps:

00:00 – You awake with a headache
01:25 – Humans are a storytelling species
01:41 – I. Paranoia
04:07 – II. Metanoia
05:53 – Sponsor
07:11 – III. Pronoia
10:19 – A very different day