It's All My Fault Part 1

It's All My Fault.

How I Messed Up the World, and Why I Need Your Help to Fix It.

Jordan Phoenix.

Dedication.

This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever been talked out of pursuing what is in their heart, and needs a reason to believe again.

To anyone who has dealt with hardships that seemed unbearable, and didn't know where to turn for help.

To anyone who has suffered great loss.

To anyone who feels like they're alone in the universe.

To anyone who has ever broken down crying from seeing another human being dig through the trash, and feeling powerless to do something about it.

To anyone who cares about people who live outside of their borders.

To anyone who knows that they're capable of moving mountains, but has trouble figuring out where to begin.

To anyone who has a vision so big that they're scared to tell others, out of fear that they'll be called crazy.

To anyone who wants to create a more free, equal, and awesome world for all of humanity.

To anyone ready to leave the status quo behind, and create a future of abundance in which everyone has their needs met.

About the Author.

Jordan Phoenix is a social entrepreneur, speaker, author, and scalability consultant. He is the founder of Project Free World, an organization that facilitates the creation of collaborative social innovation projects in order to provide the proper food, rights, education, and environment to every person on the planet. He also writes a personal development blog called Uncommon Sense to examine the rapidly evolving landscape of life in the 21st century. Jordan's work has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, The Times of India, The Huffington Post, Lifehack, MindBodyGreen, The New York Observer, The Social Journal, GOOD, and The Spark Doc.u.mentary. He was recognized as a Quora Top Writer in 2013.

Note from the Author.

The English language was first created over a millennium ago. The style and usage of a language reflects the dominant operational paradigms present in the minds of the population. As such, many of the rules that created the structure of this language reflect outdated paradigms; some of which I'd like to begin to undo with the creation of this book. You may notice that I have used plural terms such as "they" in place of "she" or "he" as often as possible. Note that this gender-neutral approach was used intentionally to shed light upon the fact that neither women nor men should be valued any less than the other.

This book represents a life philosophy and collection of ideas based upon my own knowledge, research, experiences and beliefs about life. This does not necessarily make any of it true or valid. I encourage you to not accept anything I say at face value. Examine it with your own mind, and accept the pieces that resonate and make sense to you. No one can ever be a better expert at making decisions in your own life than you can. There is no such thing as 100% pure objectivity or 100% independent research; we can only attempt to get as close as we can to it. All information and statistics are biased in one way or another, and my writings are not exempt from this. I highly recommend that you use the vast quant.i.ties of accessible public information available in this era to challenge everything and anything in this book in your own mind, and know that there are always exceptions and alternatives. There aren't any rules that are truly set in stone, there are only guidelines.

1.

When it Almost Ended.

"Jump.

You're worthless. Jump. Just do it already.

It's been in the back of your mind for months now. What's stopping you? You do realize that your apartment is the closest one to the staircase, right? No one would even see you go.

You will never be successful. Your life has no meaning. No one cares about you. It should have been obvious that no one would help you, because you're delusional. Why did you think you had what it takes to change the systems of the world? What makes you so special? You are a complete and utter failure. Everything you've ever believed in is wrong. The world is a cruel, cold, corrupt place, and there's not a thing you can do about it. Just like the many who have tried before you, you will never fix it.

Just look at your role models. Gandhi and MLK got shot in the head when they tried, and they were exceptionally great beings. You, on the other hand, are a n.o.body. You've wasted your time even trying, and you are now a laughing stock to your friends and everyone else who has ever had the displeasure of knowing you. You're a walking joke.

Everyone else was smart to stay at their corporate jobs. They're moving up the ladder now, they're buying homes, they're getting married and having kids and going on awesome vacations. They were realistic. They took their licks; they sucked it up and dealt with it. That's life.

Now you're in over your head in debt. You've been living off of credit cards, and now they're maxed out. And let's not even begin talking about your student loans. You can't even go bankrupt and wipe the slate clean. You're stuck. You will be a slave to this system forever. You'll never get married. What type of woman would want a guy who can't afford the dollar menu? You're not a real man.

Your own family members don't even want to speak to you, and you're about to get evicted from this rundown Los Angeles apartment. You've been so busy working on your idealistic nonsense that you don't even have any close friends in this city. You applied for that janitor position, and couldn't even get an interview. You have a degree in civil engineering, and you got rejected by Starbucks. You walked around Rodeo Drive -- a place where a pair of shoes cost more than your monthly rent -- with a sign offering $1,000 to anyone who would help you find work, and still no one cared enough to want to help you. You snuck into Sony Pictures and put flyers on every windshield, and all you got in return was people cursing you out. The only offers you got were scams from people trying to take money that you don't have.

Where will you live now? There's nothing left for you. Are you going to keep trying to help the homeless now? Get ready, because you're about to join the club. You're actually hurting them now, because you're going to take up extra resources that should have gone to other people who really need it. Actually, the other homeless people are better off than you are, because they're not stuck with college loans. They still can change their lives with willpower. You're trapped. You had all the potential in the world, and you blew it. You spit in the face of everything good that you ever had, and now it's all gone. You had a girlfriend, you had a six-figure career path, you had some nice things -- and you left it all -- for this? There's no hope for you. Meditation doesn't help anymore. Inspiring videos don't help. It's over.

Get out of bed right now. Walk up to the roof on the fifth floor. Then jump off. Put an end to this. Within sixty seconds, all of this can be over for good. No more suffering. No more waking up in the middle of the night from the horrible nightmares. No more having to think about all of this. Just jump."

"Fine! I'll do it. I said I will do it. Just shut up already! I can't take this anymore."

That was me answering the relentless negative voice in my head. Things had been spiraling downward for awhile, and I had finally hit rock bottom. I didn't have health insurance or money to even begin to try to dig myself out of that hole with therapy if I wanted to, because my business had failed. Oh, how the irony would get to me. An aspiring personal development coach and speaker walks away from his lucrative job, moves thousands of miles away, tries to make a living doing something that truly helps people change their lives, and ends up becoming the opposite of motivational.

My clients had no idea that I would have to leave extra early for appointments, because my car decided to pick up a new hobby of shutting off on the highway. On numerous occasions, I had paid to have it fixed, but the problem continued, and now I was completely broke. This was my only hope of generating income. I needed the car to work. When it would shut off, I'd pull over to the side of the road. The police would show up and tell me that they were required to call a tow truck, and that if my car didn't start within the 20 minutes before the truck arrived, I'd have to pay to get it towed. Luckily, most of the time it would start again within the 20 minutes; other times, it wouldn't. A part of me couldn't believe that circ.u.mstances like these really had become my life.

After I was finished with meetings, my energy level was so low that I would lay on the floor of my apartment, helpless. I would come back and just sit in the bathtub for hours, because I did not have the energy to do anything else. Never in my life did I feel more lost or more like a failure. I moved to Los Angeles -- the homeless capital of America -- with a mission of trying to end poverty, and instead ended up trapped in poverty myself. How was it possible that in Hollywood, California, where I lived, people could drive their Ferraris and Lamborghinis past dozens of people sleeping on the sidewalk? How could no one seem to care? I cared too much, and was overwhelmed with frustration about the fact that I was unable to significantly change things. I felt as if there was no place for me in the world.

The suffering had eventually become unbearable. It was so overpowering that I couldn't take it any longer. Hardly anyone knew how bad of a mental state I was in, because I kept it to myself. I truly felt that I was hopeless, and that it would be a disservice to bring anyone down with me. Sleep became my only escape. I slept as often as I could to try and avoid reality. Being awake was too hard to do. The problem arose when being asleep became even worse than being awake. I began having terrible nightmares that involved some of the most horrific things anyone could ever imagine. In one dream, I sat in the back seat of my car tied up, while someone else put it in reverse and slammed on the gas; crashing into a house at full speed. In each dream, just at the point where I was about to die, I would wake up. It got to the point where it felt like there was no escape. Being awake was too stressful. Being asleep was no better, and often ended with a wild nightmare within a few short hours. I began to stay up for as long as I possibly could, to try to delay the violent nightmares that I knew were coming.

During this stretch of time, there was violence going on in the rundown neighborhood that I lived in. Two people got shot just a hundred feet away from my window. I heard the shots go off, and saw people scatter in all directions before police came and closed off the street. The next day, I posted flyers around the neighborhood offering free meditation cla.s.ses at my apartment to try and help calm the area down a bit. This resulted in phone calls from people who believed it was a front for a prost.i.tution ring. It really felt like I was living in a h.e.l.l on earth.

On one fateful night, I decided that I couldn't take it anymore. I gave in. After awakening from a nightmare in a cold sweat, I was laying down in my bed in the five-foot by nine-foot oversized closet that was bedroom. In the silence, negative thoughts fired out from my mind like gunshots through the pitch-dark s.p.a.ce at such a rapid pace that it overwhelmed me and destroyed the last of my willpower. Like a persistent ocean wave eroding a heavy rock into dust, it had taken out all of the fight I had left in me. I had accepted my fate, and it was time to go up to the roof.

Just as I was preparing myself to go, a life-altering epiphany dawned upon me. In that moment of total surrender, feeling completely unafraid of death, I realized that for the first time in my life, I was completely free. I forfeited all of my hopes and dreams, my self-image, the story I had for my life, the external opinions, the bonds I'd made -- all of it. Something amazing happened to me in that moment that is tough to fully describe with words. I finally truly understood what Eckhart Tolle and Chuck Palahniuk had been talking about in their books. This was The Power of Now. This was Fight Club. I lost all hope, and I found freedom. I gained the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide. I will attempt to cut through the cliches, and explain this insight more thoroughly.

What I came to understand was that even though I had already accepted that I was going to die, I was still able to delay that decision indefinitely. I was playing with house money now. The conditions and circ.u.mstances of that moment became irrelevant, because it was extra time that I wasn't supposed to have. Being alive meant that no matter how bleak things looked, I could always find new opportunities to create moments of happiness in some way for myself and others, and that was all that really mattered. There are an unlimited number of ways to do a random act of kindness for someone; and as long as we can do that, we will always have the ability to add joy to the world and find meaning in this existence.

Since I'm still alive, I thought: why not put together a plan -- in book form, perhaps -- explaining my vision for the world, and the practical measures we can collectively take to make life better for one another?

Several years have now pa.s.sed since that moment. You just finished reading chapter one of that book.

2.

Visions of Utopia Let's rewind a bit to several years earlier; when I was seventeen years old, and fresh out of high school. I was young, ambitious, and happy-go-lucky -- the world was my oyster. Like many others, going away to college represented a major step toward my independence. It was the first time that I would be away from my family for an extended period. This is where I began to discover that it was possible to start with a blank canvas; to press reset, and pick and choose the things we want for our own lives. It was time for me to make the rules now. Well, some of them, at least. I discovered that with the right planning and effort, life could become a lot more enjoyable than I ever imagined. But before we get into that, I'll give you a little bit of background about what my childhood was like. In many ways, I'd been doing things differently without realizing it ever since I was in diapers.

Growing up, I never felt that I was a particularly popular kid at school. For most of my earlier years, I remember being very quiet and reserved. I stayed to myself a lot, and felt much more comfortable listening and observing than being the center of attention in most environments. Talking on the phone was never my thing, and I'd give one-word answers to every question. My friend's mother once used a sponge as an a.n.a.logy to describe me, because she said I would just sit calmly and soak up everything. Gossip was never really important to me. What really piqued my interest were ideas, as I was always very curious about learning and inventing things. I was fascinated by inventions and meteorology, and wanted to be an inventor when I grew up.

At twelve months old, I taught myself how to read item labels at the supermarket. When I was at the grocery store, I'd tell people: "Seven-U-P!" At age four, I wanted to write a letter to Nintendo explaining my ideas for a Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers video game, to ask if they would please create it for me. My mother compiled my ideas into a note, and sent it to them. They thanked me for my ideas, and said that a Chip 'n' Dale game was actually already in the works. Capcom ended up producing the game, which went on to sell over one million copies worldwide.

When I was eight, my mother pulled me out of the school I was in, because it was too easy for me. The teacher was upset when I left, because he told my mother that I was helping him teach the cla.s.s and explaining concepts to some of the students. At age twelve, I created a method for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius that was faster and easier than the formula we were given in the textbook. When word got around the cla.s.s about it, and I was able to complete the problems faster than the teacher, he said: "Your way works better than mine. I should start teaching your method instead."

Learning and getting good grades often came very naturally to me. Though one time in middle school, I failed my Italian test on purpose, because I wanted people to think I was cool and bada.s.s. I also used to pretend to forget things sometimes; because I had a really good memory, and was scared that people would think I was weird for being able to remember everything.

Looking back, how bizarre is it that the values I picked up through school and the culture around me taught me that pretending not to be smart would make people like me more? Thank goodness the women I interacted with started thinking intelligence was s.e.xy somewhere along the line. Anyway, let's not get too carried away now, and stop that train before this turns into fifty shades of J. That's material for a different book.

Outside of cla.s.s, I was very into playing football and basketball. Even though my left hand dribble flat out sucked, I would make up for it by always hustling on defense and fighting for rebounds. I treated every play like it was the 4th quarter of Game 7 of the NBA Finals. A friend of mine said that I was by far the most annoying person to get covered by in football or basketball, because I would never quit. Since many of the kids who we played with were several years older than me, I took that as a compliment.

Growing up with friends who were outside playing all day definitely helped me learn how to interact with different personalities, become more balanced, and gain some street smarts. It also helped mask the fact that I was a huge nerd, scoring in the 99th percentile on standardized math tests. I may have been dead last in homeruns. .h.i.t, but if you were picking teams and needed help figuring out who had a better on base percentage, I was your guy.

Really though, beyond the realms of sports and academics, the best thing I had going for me was that whenever I really got to know someone, they always considered me to be one of their most loyal friends. Friendship was always something very important to me. If one of my friends had a problem, it was my problem. Though I never felt very comfortable in my skin growing up (there was a high amount of stress at home related to my younger sister's severe case of autism and family finances -- we lived in a bas.e.m.e.nt for several years), being around good friends was something that made me feel safe and at peace. Luckily, making friends was also something that always came naturally to me.

This emphasis on developing meaningful friendships really came in handy when I went away to college. Though some people I knew seemed to be having a hard time adjusting to a fresh start at a new school, the quest for friendship and branching out really helped me break out of my sh.e.l.l.

Before my freshman year of college, I was the type of person who would sit down at a table at parties, feeling too self-conscious to even step onto a dance floor in a room full of people. By my junior year, I was dancing alone on a stage in front of hundreds of people, waving a fiery torch, covered in glowing silver body paint under the blacklights. A few months later, without hesitation, I jumped out of an airplane from 10,000 feet up in the sky. Anytime there was a need for someone to step up for a leadership position or to speak in public, I would volunteer first. I had begun to grow into myself. Through seizing this newfound opportunity for independence, I had become a more fully alive human being who was no longer so afraid of outside opinions.

Many of the most important things I learned in college that sparked this personal transformation did not happen within the confines of the cla.s.sroom. On the contrary, most of the things I learned came about as a result of having the luxury of sufficient time to decompress and question commonly held societal beliefs and norms. Some friends and I would often find ourselves having philosophical discussions about the meaning of life, happiness, love, and everything else under the sun. In the same way that curious babies don't need to be coerced into learning how to walk or speak, I found that learning happened much more naturally and holistically when it was not forced upon me.

There is one experience in particular that caused such a major detour on my life path that I believe a version of me in an alternate universe that hadn't gone through it would be completely unrecognizable to me right now. That experience was traveling with friends to Mexico. From the perspective of an outsider, we were nothing more than a bunch of rascally kids going to get drunk in a foreign country where the drinking age was not 21. However, the insights that I gained there would go on to change the course of not only my life, but that of many others I've met since.

A history teacher of mine may have briefly discussed severe poverty in cla.s.s, and I had seen some commercials showing starving people on television, but there is nothing that can really describe the feeling of heartbreak that arises when you see it with your own eyes. There were groups of kids aged four to seven surrounding me as I walked along the street, begging me to buy some gum. I don't even think I knew how to tie my shoes and cross the street by myself when I was four, and here were these children out late by themselves, making sales pitches and making money out of the need to survive. What made things even worse was that this was a tourist area; meaning that in relative terms, many of the surrounding regions were in an even more desperate situation. I realized that what I was witnessing was just the tip of the iceberg. Additionally, as grim as it seemed, this did not even come close to matching the conditions in some regions of Somalia or Zimbabwe.

Though I had never previously considered myself rich by any means, this really put things into a whole new perspective. So many items were mind-bogglingly inexpensive. Even as a college kid on a budget, I realized that the value of a single dollar took on so much more importance in Mexico. While it was just a dollar to me, it could mean the world to those kids. I realized that a person who was wealthy by American standards could potentially transform countless lives in that region.

On the other hand, there was also a dichotomy. At the same time that I was coming to the realization that poverty was this bad, I was being treated like royalty simply for being an American who had a few bucks in his pocket. For all of us American students visiting, our experience of Mexico was completely different than that of the everyday lives of the locals.

There were beautiful hotels, beaches lined with palm trees, and pools that had a swim up bar in the middle. There were seemingly endless games of Frisbee and volleyball. There were nightclubs sporting breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean that shot off firework displays and stayed open until sunrise. As troubling as it was to witness all of the economic hardship in the area, there was something I discovered that would completely change the way I viewed reality.

For some reason that I couldn't explain, the underlying sub-culture and unspoken rules of behavior amongst the people I knew had undergone a major shift from what was normal for us back in the states. This was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. People were much more willing to let their guard down and break out of their comfort zones. In fact, it was encouraged. Typical petty arguments and drama largely came to a halt. Compet.i.tion became collaboration. Scarcity became abundance. Everyone seemed to be more alive and genuinely happy. The level of cohesiveness within the group grew tremendously. A harmonious and interwoven way of existence emerged that felt as if it had been what I was searching for all of my life up until that point. Something about being on vacation had unlocked a part of who we were that was always there, but we were unable to collectively display it up until that point.

An even more interesting thing about this phenomenon was that after we left and went back to school, this new and expansive way of being came back with us. Furthermore, its effects began to multiply. Friends of friends who hadn't been there started to subconsciously take notice and follow suit. Conformity to this new status quo now effortlessly became a force for something better. It began to feel as if this was the way life should be, and could be -- for anyone who wanted it.

Being nineteen years old at the time, I was fascinated by this seemingly spontaneous occurrence of social paradigm change. Having had grown up around much negativity and discord, and experiencing the psychological damage created by these types of sub-cultures, I was determined to figure out exactly what happened here, and how it could be replicated. I began to examine all of the factors in play, in order to discover the vital ingredients that were the driving catalysts for this pattern to blossom. What was the formula? Could I crack the code on how to set up the ideal conditions to enable a transformational shift of the beliefs and behaviors of a culture? In order to figure this out, I had to first explore the conditions that created the original paradigm, to gain a deep understanding of how it was able to shift.

Having grown up and gone to school in New York City, I was not exempt from the social status totem pole that permeates and dictates modes of behavior in youth circles. As kids, we are often directly or indirectly taught to measure our self-worth through a basis of comparison to those around us. There was a highly compet.i.tive atmosphere surrounding individual performance levels in sports, on tests, and materially. If someone had the latest toy or the newest pair of Jordans, it would make everyone else both impressed and envious.

For many teens, the largest measuring stick of all for self-worth involves the amount of s.e.xual attraction received. This is what the fancy items, excelling in sports, and every other form of a.s.serting dominance were all about. Though I had a few girlfriends through the teen years, these relationships almost always ended with me getting dumped without warning, so I definitely did not feel very attractive inside. For others who had not yet had anyone show interest in them, it was even worse. Throw rampant bullying into the mix, and it compounds these problems even further. It's hard to think highly of yourself when others tell you in one hundred and one ways that you're not good enough.

This socially awkward phase is actually pretty common, and it's a shame that we don't realize that while going through it, because we end up taking it personally as a result. The damage it does to the psyche is so traumatizing that in many cases, it never goes away. We are only human, and every one of us deals with some projected imperfection that can make us feel insecure inside.

Whether it's feeling like we're not good looking enough, not funny enough, not athletic enough, don't have the latest and greatest brand name clothes, or whatever our own personal excuse may be, we take these perceived slights to heart. We begin to carry a chip on our shoulders that positions us against the world. Sadly, this makes it even harder to discover who we really are at the core; as the most important mission in our lives simply becomes proving to everyone else that we are capable of doing what those bullies in grade school said we could not. Alternatively, we might just throw our hands up in despair, and let that misery and bitterness prevent us from ever believing we are capable of accomplishing anything of real value. We can experience a life-altering sense of overwhelming frustration, because we falsely begin to believe that underneath it all, we are not truly worthy of love and acceptance from friends and mates.

This is where I started to delve into Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and John Bowlby's attachment theory to really understand, at a deep level, the core driving forces behind what motivates nearly all of human behavior. There are the core survival needs that include food, shelter, safety, and good health; but beyond that, it turns out we humans are pretty simple creatures after all.

What we ultimately want is the freedom to feel loved and accepted for who we really are. We want to feel as if our lives are meaningful; as if we are a part of something bigger than just ourselves; and we do that most effectively by giving others the best of what we have to offer, in order to feel a strong connection to other living creatures. Nearly everything we do in life can be tied back to this need for love and acceptance. Even the subtle, seemingly unconscious behaviors such as matching our socks and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g our fingernails are largely done for this very same reason.

I began to examine the conditions that existed in Mexico that enabled me to transcend the feelings of not being worthy of acceptance that I had carried around with me for years. For starters, there is something about traveling on an adventure to a new place with friends that bonds you closer together in a primal way. Being in a new environment, everyone was also more willing to suspend judgment for the sake of living it up in the moment. This was a major key. It seems that all it takes is one influential person who is too negative or judgmental within a social circle to keep everyone feeling too inhibited to expand past their fears and become more of who they really are. Being completely free of the grasp of oppressive influences for even a short period of time can really do wonders for a person's self-esteem.

As a result, I was able to be myself in ways that I had never done before. Not only did it make me feel more confident and more alive, but for the first time, it seemed like women were noticing me without me even trying. This was a major part of the chip on my shoulder that I always felt determined to get rid of, and it was an indescribable relief to finally feel it happening. Up until that point, I always felt unworthy of any woman I dated, and wondered what they saw in me. I always felt lucky to have anyone, no matter how little they respected me; and in retrospect, this was exactly why it always ended in such a train-wreck fashion (making the cycle worse each time). It was the essence of possessing a scarcity mentality. But now, things were different. I was with good friends, in paradise, and feeling comfortable in my own skin for the very first time. Every day was amazing and abundant. Every time I went to bed, ready to go to sleep, I was excited to see what tomorrow would bring. It felt like my soul had inhabited a new body, and I was experiencing what it really felt like to live as a free spirit. I felt reborn.

The interesting thing was: I wasn't the only one who was experiencing this. Many others were experiencing the exact same feeling of breaking out of the sh.e.l.l that I had. Though we came from different geographical regions, grew up with different childhood experiences, and had different perceived personal flaws -- it made no difference. This was the same transformation others had spoken about experiencing at music festivals. I realized that this abundant and positive way of thinking and being was mostly just a state of mind, and that in the right conditions, it was possible for anyone to access and unlock it. This was utopia. This surreal experience of self-actualization was a preview of what world peace would be like, and I could clearly see that it was only the beginning of the next steps in the evolution of human civilization.

When I was walking around the streets to see the reality of what life was like for the impoverished residents of Guerrero, Mexico, I saw that the good vibe that I was feeling was contagious. It transcended language. I wanted so badly to be able to spread that sense of joy to everyone; to give others an opportunity to feel the freedom that I felt. I did not want to see anyone hungry, or poor, or angry.

But when food and survival necessities are scarce, the mission to acquire these items consumes all of our mental energy, and this is what averts us from even beginning to immerse ourselves into an abundance mentality. When we are guided by fear, the self-preservation instinct kicks in, and we see ourselves as being at war with any competing parties that we believe are going to try to prevent us from meeting our needs. This is where I had the insight that changed the course of my life forever, and set me down a path that led to the creation of this book: All forms of negativity that exist in this world stem from individuals whose basic needs are not being met. If we can create a sound strategy to enable and empower every person alive to be able to create and receive their basic needs -- the proper food, rights, education, environment, love and acceptance -- the negativity will fall to a minimum, and the quality of life for all of us will rise to levels we can barely even begin to imagine.

Imagine a world without poverty, imagine a world without war; imagine a world without random shootings, or terrorism, and all other forms of gore.

Imagine a world without pollution, a world with clean water, soil and air; imagine a world full of joy and happiness, a world that is righteous, n.o.ble and fair.

Imagine a world in which we all come together to heal from the vast suffering and pain; imagine a world in which dropping labels and humanizing one another takes precedence over the petty and vain.

Imagine a world completely saturated with love and romance; imagine the transformation that will occur when we finally decide to give this world a chance.

I entered Mexico as a person looking to discover freedom from the fears and self-doubts that had prevented me from ever feeling whole, and I left Mexico wanting to create a world in which anyone could have the ability to experience this transformation. It truly is in all of our best interests to come together right now, focus, and map out a way to make this world a reality.

3.

Why We're Stuck The visions of utopia in chapter two were extremely important for us to discuss, in order to set the compa.s.s needle in the right direction. Next, it's time to begin looking into how we can bridge the gap from here to there. The first step in that process of bridging the gap will take place in this chapter, as we must first be able to clearly identify and understand a set of problems before we can attempt to fix them. We will examine some historical and current world affairs, in order to shed some light upon how we got here, and why we're currently in this position.

At the time of writing of this, it's still relatively early in the 21st century. What a time to be alive. The information age is here, and it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. The speed of technological progress keeps accelerating, and this has resulted in countless mind-blowing inventions that have significantly improved the quality of many lives. But at the same time, it has brought a number of interlocking challenges along with it that are more complex than we've ever seen before.

Despite the fact that we can send people to outer s.p.a.ce, and send an email to the other side of the world within seconds, nearly one out of every two children alive right now still do not have their basic needs met. An estimated 22,000 children die every day as a result of poverty, with hunger being the number one cause of death in the world. 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 (USD) per day, while nearly half of the world's population (three billion) lives on less than $2.50 per day.

To put that in perspective, if your average daily expenses are $4, including housing, food, water, transportation, healthcare, energy, education, communication devices, sanitation, household appliances, clothing, travel, entertainment, gifts, and all other personal items, you have more money than most of the rest of the people on earth. If your average daily expenses are $11, you have more money than four out of five people on the planet.

Somehow, more people in the world have access to mobile phones than to clean water or toilets. We've built nuclear reactors that we don't know how to shut down right next to fault lines, leaving them completely susceptible to major earthquakes. We're spilling oil and chemicals that contaminate major bodies of water. Collectively, we are falling short in our ability to prioritize long-term, holistic thinking over that of short-term benefits. Even if one doesn't personally own or work for a company that creates these products, if there's a major demand for them, it means that lots of us must be buying them or doing business with them in some way.

In many places worldwide, we're over-utilizing rivers and other areas of fresh water, which dries them out. This can result in major problems in the coming years for us, since we depend on them for drinking water, crop irrigation and many other uses. We're also over-utilizing arable farmland in many places as well by not rotating the crops, and not partaking in farming best practices -- in pursuit of short term gains. This depletes the nutrients from the soil, makes the land unusable for plant life, and increases the price of food; which increases the amount of people who go hungry. At its most severe levels, it can create dust storms that make an area completely uninhabitable. During the Dust Bowl of the 1930's, 2.5 million Americans were displaced, and 500,000 people became homeless.

To make matters worse, the United States -- the world's leading producer of corn -- diverts 40% of it away from dinner plates to produce ethanol for cars and SUVs. So essentially, by simply choosing to drive an SUV rather than a car, we are contributing to driving the cost of food out of the price range of some other family's budget. We've set up a system by which, knowingly or unknowingly, our desire for a slightly larger or faster automobile competes directly with our desire for food to remain affordable for a starving child in another region.