The Changing Nature of Reality and it's implications for you!

Last Updated: March 29, 2022

Hi Ladies and Gents,
 
Well, I’m a day late on the Monday post again.  The Internet has been as slow as MUD lately with my whole district under lockdown, and I couldn’t get my VPN working most of yesterday to be able to reach the “outside world,” ha, ha!  It is funny for me to think that Weebly, the platform on which this entire blog and website you are currently browsing was built, was very first recommended to me way back in 2012 when I first came to China to work as a website builder with a great free option that actually WORKED IN CHINA WITHOUT A VPN (key)!  In those days I had come out to China to teach 5th Grade Science and lead the Elementary School Science Team at The SMIC Private School in the eastern portion of the City of Shanghai.  My 5th Team Leader had us all build Weebly sites for our respective classes.  Gosh, that was back at the very tail end of the era of the “individual” website, as I call it.  And by “individual website,” no, I don’t mean the age of first-generation stand-alone personal homepages – oh how I miss those days; Facebook (and dare I even say MySpace, back in those days) had largely killed those by 2012 already.
 
By “individual website” I mean, in this case, websites that people would build for things like throwing a garage sale, family reunion, or other event or party; websites that teachers would build for their classes; small-time informational sites built about certain things or places built by individuals, such as “Dave’s Guide to Yellowstone National Park;” and, yes, I do suppose the bigger, beefier, relaunched and reloaded “Web 2.0” version of personal homepages would fit into this category, too.  I mean, there are still plenty of these sites around, for sure!  And plenty new ones are built all the time, but it’s not like it use to be on the Internet anymore with all the “walled gardens” out there that people are so crazy about – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you know them all, and those are where everyone “hangs out” these days.  Corporate websites and websites that sell things dominate your search engines these days, not “Dave’s Guide to Yellowstone National Park,” (unless Dave is an affiliate with some hiking outfitter!).  I mean, let’s get real, no 16-year-old kid alive today is every going to believe that people use to go through the “trouble” of building a stand-alone website to showcase and invite people to their wedding, or to do something so mundane and trivial as throw a garage sale (I put “trouble” in quotes because those of us who did this back in the day didn’t consider it “trouble,” ha, ha!  It was the wave of the future!).  Heck, that’s what Facebook and Craig’s List are for, right!?
 
I use this lead in about slow Internet speeds and lack of VPN accessibility under lockdown, websites, and how the web has changed in a very short amount of time (the story I am talking about here happened in 2012, a mere 10 years ago) to illustrate the title and the core of this post – the nature of reality.  Reality is FLUID and reality can CHANGE in the blink of an eye!  I suppose know one knows this better than a seasoned teacher who really has his or her eyes open to what is going on at school anyway, right?!  Look at how COVID-19 brought the world to a stand-still, all because governments around the world didn’t want to “waste a good emergency,” or at least that’s the way I see it (and believe you me, at first I was one of the many masses of “sheeple” who actually thought I had narrowly escaped death by a hair’s breadth!  Yes, you can laugh all you want – I have woken up and seen the light now!).
Governments put policies into place and suddenly that becomes the new reality.  Mass-distributed textbooks teach gigantic swathes of a population one thing at a very young age and that becomes that generation’s “base” for reality, then a section is thrown out, a chapter re-written, a story re-told by a different narrator, and the book is re-released, a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th….69th edition comes out, each with different parameters for “reality.”  There are groups of people alive today around the world who are otherwise quite “normal” (whatever that really means) human beings who adamantly insist that people have never walked on the surface of Earth’s Moon, and there’s no convincing them otherwise!  There are people alive today (many people, actually, myself included this time!) who believe that we should still teach cursive writing in school, despite the fact that no one writes with pen and paper anymore!  “But we can’t let the skill die!” these people say!  Well, but we have let the art and craft of stone tool making die.  People don’t use those anymore (and don’t be the crackpot commentor who says you do, ha, ha!  I’m sure some wise guy someone out there uses some kind of tool made of stone for something even now in 2022, but humor me here, will ya!).  Just a mere 300 years ago people thought the idea of germs spreading disease was outright crazy!
 
When we use examples of something so far removed in time, people easily tend to think: “Eh, well, yeah, of course, the ancients and old-timers didn’t know jack!  Look at us today and all we know!”  Well, if that’s your line, I’ve got news for you, bud!  Ol’ Jack and Jane Doe said the same thing in 1722 looking back at the people who had lived 300 years before them!
 
Reality changes ALL THE TIME!  And it can happen suddenly, and then, boom!  That’s it!  Reality is different than it was last week, or different than it even was a day ago!
 
I am not here to place a value judgement on reality’s fluid nature.  In fact, if I dare try I say it is neither good nor bad – it just is; that’s just how it is.
 
But why muse over this here on a site devoted to making money, coaching, and education?  Well, the whole point in this regard is that reality is flexible, malleable, to a point, at least, and you have some control over it.  You have quite a bit of control over it, actually.  You might not be able to single-handedly change reality overnight – yet – but you can bend, morph, and sculpt the reality around you to a larger degree than you may even believe right now over time.  This means that you can change things and make them different.  You have free-will and thus the power to semi-control your own reality in big ways.  While this can definitely be scary, on the flip side, there are huge implications and opportunities for growth, self-development, being a better person, and, of course, getting what you want and making more money (of course, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about this, and I advocate for the right way)!
 
Until next time!

Better life, better business, better you!
 
Ideas, inspiration, opportunity,

-Andreas

Andreas Philip Gross Enterprises
 
Washington State Certified K-8 Educator, K-12 International Education Consultant, Professional Coach, Proofreader/Editor, Affiliate Marketer, Popsicle Stick Crafter, Print-on-Demand Products Designer, and Webmaster

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