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Oops, I almost forgot. 

![green.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/23u65KabYFB3acvE6EcqjyPtteCFBNby5skQZVAnGRXFacZXpKFDsYyExCPfufDbTz4vn.jpg)

It is pinch and punch time. Time to power up a little for the first of the month. I have been routinely doing this for a long time now in various amounts, but this month I decided to add 500, which is a minnow-sized account. Back in the day, it required being a minnow in order to get a voting slider to adjust vote values. I didn't know this at the time and thought there was a UI change. 

![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/23t74pF2JDZ1VWSRkfp1yYRPmdQzDSzpeHxbm3uWmFygQwTaWFBWA3cdw7Pz8uor4GAwA.png)

Speaking of change, tomorrow morning my wife and daughter head back to work and daycare, so will have to get back into rhythm. As chance would have it, my daughter has been getting up at about 630am every morning - except for the last few days, where she is *finally* starting to sleep in, just in time to have to be forced awake. She is going to love it - *as we all do.*

I myself still have at least a couple of weeks left of sick leave before having to head back into the office. To do what, I am still unsure, as I am definitely not ready to go straight into customer deliveries and I have this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that I never will be. I intellectually know this is not the case, but emotionally, that fear is there. 

Since I was a kid, I have relied heavily on my ability to work to make ends meet and even though I have got myself into some financial woes on occasion, work ethic got me through. I have done a lot of things that given the choice, I wouldn't have done. Well, there is always a choice, but if the alternative is to go hungry and be unable to pay the rent, it isn't much of an option. 

As they say, *necessity is the mother of invention* and when faced with scarcity and need, we tend to find ways to do things that we wouldn't have done otherwise in order to close that gap. Of course, with a scarcity mindset, is easy to feel that there is always need and then, no matter how much one has, more is needed to close a non-existent gap and if this is the continual habit, it tends to stretch further and further into things we wouldn't have done otherwise, until we no longer recognize ourselves in the mirror. 

People fear losing themselves to change so many become stubborn and fight against the conditions in order to remain the same. Yet, we are born to evolve in many ways, meaning that *who we are* is always changing, there is no single and immutable me. Fighting against the conditions means to become less suited and capable of dealing with the dynamic world and inevitably, we will change under the pressure of our own resistance, with many becoming bitter, cold, disillusioned. After all, the world has changed, not them, and back in the day, *they felt okay.*

Now, they might feel disenfranchised from the world, disconnected from society and like they don't fit in because, they don't. They have held onto a fashion style of themselves in a world of changing fashions and blame those who changed for acting unnaturally. As I have said before, there are many victims in this world. 


It is hard not to feel victimized when things happen that are outside of our control, but we have the potential to own our perceptions of the world and the attitudes they evoke. Many people seem so angry with life, so disappointed by the way things have turned out and even as they say they are joking, the acerbic undercurrent of words and behavior is clear to see, by anyone who can bother watching. 

Bitter people tend not to have an audience for long, because the audience soon learns that they are not having something given to them, it is they who are the product. People who see themselves as victims aren't offering something, they want something. They want an audience, attention, sympathy, money, votes. They want to be listened to, they want to have influence, they want to gain control over others - because they do not have control over who they are. If they did - *they wouldn't see themselves as a victim.*

Adjusting ourselves in adversity is a powerful human trait and it is this skill that allows us to adapt to conditions in such ways, that we can populate any climate, including the conditions of space. Yet we lose its capabilities when we force ourselves into remaining the same, because when we don't change and we see ourselves a victim, we maintain that perspective. *Once a victim, always a victim.*

It sounds very much like an addiction, doesn't it?

Habits matter and they fall on both sides of the normal distribution. Some will help us, some will harm us and I guess one of the goals of life is to do more good than ill, including to ourselves. If we can skew our habits toward the improvement side, in time, we will have built for ourselves a new average, a *new normal.* And all of these little shifts add up, compound and evolve us - *for the conditions we face, or against them.  

While I powerup earnings every day through my writing, at least once a month I *take* the opportunity to reevaluate my position and choose whether I am going to opt-in again. In time, these small daily actions can provide an outweighed return, one that didn't seem conceivable when the action was first performed.

When I return to work, I am going to still feel disconnected as I do now and I am going to struggle to do tasks that I could do with ease earlier. But, these are the new conditions and this means, regardless of whether I want to or not, I have to invest into myself and adapt so that I can evolve. 

It is necessary to reinvent who I am, so that I can face the new world I live in. To be a victim of circumstance, is to make the decision that there is no choice, that nothing can be done - and that is likely *never* true.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]

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