Many Americans today feel like they’re being crushed by the weight of modern life.
“Right now, absolutely everything feels unstable — the economy, the culture, politics, wars breaking out, our families, prices climbing. Paychecks somehow or another feel smaller every single month. People are screaming at each other online,” Glenn Beck sighs.
Over time, this pressure begins to erode the human soul and sow seeds of anger and bitterness.
Glenn has experienced the effects of this himself, especially in his 20s and 30s.
“I got in this place to where I thought, you know, if I can just get ahead of the next disaster, or if I could just get the next promotion, if I could just get that raise, buy that house, afford that car, if I could just win the next argument, if I could just get people to see things what I want them to see, then maybe I’d feel OK,” he recounts. “No, no — those things would happen, and then I would feel more empty.”
Even though today Glenn is in a far more healthy place and no longer copes with “drugs and alcohol,” he admits that he still finds himself numbing in other ways, like “doomscrolling.”
“I think that’s where a lot of people are right now. … We are spiritually exhausted; we are emotionally way underwater; we are isolated,” he says.
He knows from personal experience, however, that trying to rigidly control everything is not the answer. Freedom, he says, is actually found when we finally realize that control is an illusion.
“We’ve tried to predict the future, fix the country, save our kids, survive the economy, hold our relationships together, and then somehow or another still sleep well at night. No wonder people are cracking,” he proclaims.
There’s only one way we survive this: “radical honesty.”
“And it starts with looking in the mirror and dropping the act that you’re in control,” Glenn says frankly.
He argues that when we attempt to control everything, we’re allowing fear to sit behind the steering wheel of our lives.
“We have to start saying, ‘Fear has been driving a lot of my decisions, and it’s got to stop,”’ he says.
No more blaming the media, politicians, or our parents for our own shortcomings. “Start telling the truth about you,” Glenn urges, acknowledging that this is “hard” but leads to “freedom.”
Once you see yourself clearly, the next step is to “surrender to the understanding that [you’re] not God” and thus have no control over anything external.
This doesn’t mean that we give up on the pursuit of what’s good and true; it just means we stop trying “to carry the entire weight of the world on [our] shoulders,” Glenn says.
The only thing we can and should try to control, he encourages, is our own behavior.
“Tell the truth. Make amends. Be dependable. Stay sober or soberminded. Love your family deeply. Spend every minute present with them. Admit when you’re wrong. Turn off the phone. Help the person in front of you. … Get your soul in order,” Glenn implores.
“A society only survives when enough ordinary people choose to live their lives with integrity while the world around them has lost its mind, and I think people deep down are starving for this right now.”
To hear more, watch the video above.
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