Lual Ding

I think the best thing we can do to change the world is to inspire young people. The more people realize that the key to happiness in life is to surround yourself with good friends, to be a good friend, to challenge yourself in honest ways, to not take short cuts but rather to rise to the challenge and grow from the struggle. To not be jealous of each other’s success but rather be inspired by it. The more we realize that the key to happiness doesn’t lay in numbers in a bank account but in the way we make others feel and the way they make us feel. The values of true community.

Although these values are massively important and resonate with every honest person when they’re discussing “meaning” and “happiness” in life, they’re not taught in school. We learn the building blocks of mathematics, the fundamentals of language, the facts of history - but we never learn how to manage our minds. We never learn how to live by a code and to surround yourself with like-minded people and to inspire and encourage each other.

Occasionally we’re fed clumsy, abstract shit like “think positive!” but no one ever gives us a clear path of what the fuck that means. No one ever tells you that all the success in the world will leave you a miserable wreck of a person if you stab your brothers and sisters in the back in your attempt to reach victory. No one ever tells you that all the money in the world ain’t worth shit if no one gives a fuck about you and you have no friends.

The quicker we all realize that we’ve been taught how to live life by people that were operating on the momentum of an ignorant past the quicker we can move to a global ethic of community that doesn’t value invented borders or the monopolization of natural resources, but rather the goal of a happier more loving humanity.

People can still make money and still find success while doing it all ethically. We live in a time where we’re seeing corporations acting as remorseless, profit seeking monsters with each human part required to keep it moving feeling free of guilt because of the diffusion of responsibility that comes with being a single piece in a huge machine. Too many people have the attitude that this is the only way to do big business. That’s a pile of weak bullshit, and this generation may be one of the first generations that has the information available to make that distinction and stop that flawed model from being acceptable.

The more people require the highest level of friendship and love of themselves the more other people will be inspired by them. If that sounds like some hippy, utopian bullshit… it’s because it is. It also might be the only way people are ever really going to change. One person inspiring another, each commiting to upholding a higher standard until it becomes the norm.

Humanity has changed drastically over the past few thousand years. It used to be when people you didn’t know showed up in town they were there to rape and murder. Now, they’re tourists and they’re welcomed with open arms as a valuable part of the global economy. One day I believe that if we don’t blow ourselves up, or poison ourselves with polution, or get wiped out by a super-bug or an asteroid impact we’ll slowly come to the understanding that we really are just one species, and that the only way to truly be happy is if everyone around you is happy as well.