By Akaisha Kaderli, RetireEarlyLifestyle.com
Special to the Financial Independence Hub
We have a choice; living a life of fear, or one of hope and optimism.
Fear
Dwelling on fears clouds the mind.
It creates anxiety, emotional contraction, judgment of others and it becomes difficult to make a clear decision about anything. Moving forward becomes arduous because there is so much doubt. Fear sees limitation, lack of options, and darkness of mind: it’s called depression.
When we are in the middle of it, fear seems very real. What I’m talking about is not the kind of fear when someone has a knife to your throat, threatens your family, or if a wild bear is chasing you. I’m talking about the fear we manufacture in our minds in response to something that we have little control over.
Optimism
When we consider our abilities, good fortunes, and the possibilities of the future, we are able to see windows instead of walls. It’s the place where we have ideas, dreams, solutions to existing problems, and create new inventions.
Yes, currently we are in the middle of some fear-full stuff that is going on. And how you choose to see it makes all the difference.
There will be hundreds if not thousands of new businesses and inventions born out of this present crisis. Perhaps the next Amazon, eBay or Genentech will be leading us into the future. Human beings are very creative. Remember the saying “Necessity is the Mother of invention”?
This is how society, the human race and free enterprise has propelled us forward through the previous decades and centuries. Even Winston Churchill said “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
A little perspective
Few of us were around in 1918 when the Spanish Flu broke out: specifically called the H1N1 virus. About one third of the global population was infected with approximately 675,000 deaths in the US. At that time the US population was 103 million making the US death rate 0.0066.
Extrapolating this out using today’s population numbers of 331 Million would mean we would have 2,185,000 deaths caused by this pandemic.
This is a big difference from the roughly 140,000 deaths today and back then during the Spanish Flu, no businesses or schools were closed.
More recently
We had the Hong Kong flu, H3N2, in 1968. Many of you were around, including us, through this period. As the name indicates this virus also originated in China and lasted into 1970. Continue Reading…