Budgeting My Emotions

The world was becoming crazier, unhinged even! War here, another war there, elections, etc. By then it was no secret that anger fuelled engagement, that engagement fuelled media platforms, algorithms, and egos. And that the era of misinformation started ten years ago, and just now we were beginning to see the consequences of it.

Now, I am not going to get political. Whatever position you hold on a global conflict, chances are I hold it too, and I don’t say this out of cowardice, sides have nothing to do with what I want to say.

At this time, around 2023–2024, I was beginning to explore the world because of my job trading green energy and funding renewable projects, helping my coworker work on the architecture and tools to quantify water purification. I began to feel rather positive about the world. Capitalism wasn’t no longer the monster who is like “muahaha! I will burn this forest and make a parking lot!!” I now knew that regulations and laws are in place and strictly enforced to ensure that as many players, mostly the big ones, adhere to rules that aim to neutralize the environmental endangerment byproduct of their manufacturing pipeline.

Perhaps I was a little too naive, “oh wow, this factory polluted a river, but that’s ok because they planted a tree n_n!” But the more I got into that world, the more I noticed the efforts for reducing pollution, neutralizing CO2 emissions, auditing factories, putting fines in place, all with the intention of mitigating, perhaps even healing, the soil surrounding them. And this to me deserves celebration. Not in a “capitalism is actually good, Coca-Cola is woke and cares about me, and you and you!” way, but in a world that at the time felt like it was on the verge of WW3, these were little victories that kept me hopeful. And they were more than little victories, they were victories.

Why would I choose to go to bed, close my eyes, and anger myself at the statistics of how people suffer from the most out-of-nowhere consequences of industrialization?

At the time some friends were critical of me working in the development of mining automation, and of me thinking that purifying thousands of tons of water was enough to cleanse the negative output to the world while the CEOs sleep safe and cozy in beds made of money and cotton at night.

But I felt like, why the fuck do I care if a rich guy merits their position or not? Why do I care if their blankets consists of $100 notes? I have no control over that. I have control over ensuring people don’t die mining in deep, deep dangerous zones. I have control over ensuring the water my coworkers purify is safer to drink than the bottled water on my desk as I type this. I had control over helping Mexico have the infrastructure to survive another power outage like the one Texas had some months or years before, when their wind turbines froze.

If I can go to bed feeling happy that I get to be a part of this, why would I choose to be angry that my friends, who all they do is play videogames, have stronger, more negative opinions as a byproduct of doom scrolling? More even, they would refuse to even conceive the idea of living a corporate or political lifestyle because at the end of the day nothing really matters.

It was angering, but I had all of these thoughts sparse all over. I knew that misinformation existed. I knew the way people viewed the world was drastically different from the reality where I was standing. I knew that, while a little, I was working on projects that were making the world I live in better, aiding people who are far more capable than me to have a faster, wider reach. And yet despite how happy I was, I was constantly told I should feel angry.

I should hate and resent what is not in my control. And it was though, because at the time I was going through an insane, hurtful betrayal by somebody who was special to me.

This one time I was in Panama, nice hotel, nice view, nice amenities, when a coworker approached me and said, “why the sour face?” I asked her, “how do you conciliate the fact that everything we do, which is ontologically good, we only do it because behind us there is a monster? How do you not feel like you’re just somebody walking with a broom behind a horse, cleaning up anytime it shits just to turn around and say, don’t worry! horse parades don’t dirty the roads!”

She looked around and said, “there is a pool over there, and almost every man swimming in it is your type, why are you making yourself so miserable when joy is within your reach.”

I’m not sure this was her intention, but in that moment I realized that I was in a position where I can do good, and I can feel better doing what I can, regardless of how I quantify it. And that being perpetually angry and resentful over things out of my control wouldn’t drive me to work harder.

Walking into that pool and giggling as I see men shirtless jump in and out of the pool, that will motivate me to keep doing what I’m doing, so I can keep rewarding myself with moments like this. Shallow? Yes. But my emotions are a currency, a currency tied to my time on earth.

And at the end of the day what helps me sleep at night isn’t a quantified measure of how much green energy we distributed, or thinking that a CEO died in a rather comical accident. What helps me sleep at night is not having spent my day angry, knowing I did something that brought joy to my life.

By this point in my life I had realized that no matter how much good happens in the world, no matter how big you can quantify a victory, it is never enough for some people. And maybe that makes sense. It is easy to be strongly opinionated from the comfort of your own home. There has to be something in the psychology of someone who would rather spend their energy being angry and exhausted by the world than doing something meaningful.

Being part of two drastically different worlds, I began to question reality itself. Is it really possible that Mexico and LATAM are so far ahead of the US on these matters? Maybe. I have never been to the US and honestly I don’t want to. But it did start to feel a little unrealistic that the idea of the US as hell on earth came from people who, by any measurable standard, were overwhelmingly irresponsible with their own lives and with how they engaged with the world.

I would read their tweets and their anger and think, what would it be like to be a coworker of this person? And then I realized I couldn’t even answer that, because they refused to get a job. As someone who had worked really hard to fix my life, this rejection of improving one’s own situation under the excuse of mental health, while just waiting for some radical external change to make the world ideal, began to feel unhealthy. I probably shared some of their goals and some of their ideologies, but I also wanted to maximize my experience as a conscious being, and some people were actively dragging me down.

So I made what might be one of the meanest decisions of my life. I started distancing myself from younger artists, from artists who didn’t have jobs, who didn’t take commissions seriously, who didn’t seem to be moving anywhere. And in retrospect I realized that almost all of my socially induced anxiety and stress was coming from exactly those circles.

The transition wasn’t immediate, but I got better at measuring the positive value someone brought into my life. And yes, it felt mean, and yes, it felt classist, and yes, it drastically reduced the number of potential friends I had. But it also enriched my life in a real way. I began surrounding myself with healthier, harder-working, more grounded people.

Not because they are morally better, but because they are less addicted to outrage, less prone to internet rage bait, more pragmatic in how they interpret the world, and most importantly because they understand what it means to be busy, and they respect and value my time.

I got a new mantra in life by which I value people

Live your principles, put your money where your mouth is, and read beyond the fucking headline.