Misplaced Energy

Today’s Topics

• Pride Costs More Than People Admit🦁

• Dubious Speculation🕵️

  5 Mins Read Time

Pride Costs More Than People Admit🦁
By Jo

Lately, I’ve been wrestling with the concept of pride and how deeply it shapes people’s lives—for better and for worse.

I’ve seen pride convince people to hide major changes in their appearance because they don’t want others to see them differently. They don’t want the questions, the sympathy, or the feeling of being viewed as weaker than they once were. And honestly, I understand it. But at the same time, I’ve realized how much pride can quietly isolate people from those who genuinely care about them.

I’ve also seen entitlement convince people who think they deserve special treatment. I’ve even had to examine my own relationship with anger—learning when to defend myself and when to let things go.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize pride can quietly become our downfall.

A few days ago, I saw a story circulating online about an argument at a gas station that escalated because neither person wanted to back down. One man never made it home. That situation stuck with me because it forced me to ask:
what is pride actually worth?

Life changes all of us eventually. Money changes. Health changes. Circumstances shift. And when those transitions happen, pride often resists adaptation.

But survival sometimes requires flexibility.

Water survives because it adapts without losing its nature. People, on the other hand, often destroy themselves trying to preserve an outdated version of who they used to be.

Pride has value.
But unchecked pride comes with a cost.

Dubious Speculation🕵️
By Marcus

was at the gym earlier this week when I glanced up at one of the TVs. I saw a story that future NBA Hall of Famer LeBron James was knocked out of the playoffs and is now a free agent.

Now the big question is……

What will he do next???

Now, if you don’t care about basketball, that’s fine. This is more about how we can get lost spending enormous amounts of time speculating about things we have no control over.

I’m not an NBA insider, but I can tell you with 100% certainty LeBron will do one of the following:

1. Re-sign with his current team

2. Sign with another team

3. Retire

Now sports media, and media in general, will milk this story dry all summer long with special broadcasts, “breaking news,” daily “LeBron tracker” segments, full-length documentaries, or whatever they can pull to get every ounce of viewership.

INTERESTED BUT NOT INVOLVED

Don’t get me wrong, I’m interested in this story. It’s really all entertainment at the end of the day. I used to be the guy who would religiously follow a story like this every day for months.

As I got older, I realized there were maybe better uses of my time.

Speculation has its place, but sometimes we can spend too much of our time and energy on situations we have no control over. In the end, you’ll get an answer, and all that time speculating is energy and attention that could be spent elsewhere.

Where that energy goes, of course, is up to you. I spend the time I used to spend speculating now on gaming, reading, working, projects, or just getting outside to touch grass.

You don’t have to follow someone else’s life when you can be the one creating storylines for yourself