What We Can Learn from the Las Vegas Tragedy: Thoughts on the Public and Media Response

Chris Albert 00:00:01 (link to this point)

What's going on everybody? Welcome to the Warrior Soul podcast, and today is going to be a very short audio essay. Today today is 10/02/2017. And when I woke up this morning very early, I glanced onto my computer. I actually don't look at the news and I try not to look at the news as much as possible throughout the day.

But a headline caught my eye and it's probably the same headline that a lot of you saw and that was that there was a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. And as I glanced through my social media, because the next thing I did was I started to worry about whether or not anybody I knew or directly or indirectly was affected by the shooting. And it's a horrible thing. It's a horrible, horrible thing. But I think that when we face days like this, one of the biggest things we need to do as people is to understand that life is precious.

And I don't it's like a cliche thing to say right now. Right? Life is precious. We've lost so many people. Life is precious.

But think about it. How many more minutes do you have on this earth to do something? How many more times are you gonna be able to hug your loved ones, to kiss them? How many more opportunities are you gonna be able to have to leave a legacy here on this earth? And it's not something we should be thinking about all the time, like to the point of obsessing over it, but it's something we should always keep in mind because each and every one of us out here, we face challenges.

We face obstacles. We face problems. We face tragedy in our lives. But something I've said before is that tragedy really isn't what makes you special. What what makes you special is how you overcome it and how you respond to it.

And that's something, but that's not why I'm coming on today. I'm coming on because I'm looking at the social media and I'm glancing around and despite the fact that this tragedy happened, what what we see happening is people automatically placing blame on each other. And, you know, the the left wing is going after the right wing because of of guns, and then the right wing is is claiming that that the killer was a liberal. And I have no knowledge of this, and I, frankly, am not privy to the situation at all and I'm honestly not following the the news close enough to know. But my memory always drifts back to 09/11/2001 after that great national tragedy.

And when we look into what happened on that day, we we hear about New Yorkers going around September and and being kind to each other and being good to each other. And it just seems that in today's world with the advent of the Internet and keyboard warriors, we automatically have people trying to point fingers at each other, trying to spread hate for each other, trying to jump to some sort of conclusion. And I think the big thing is that people have stopped really savoring those moments. Right? Savoring both the good and bad moments in your life and the opportunities that they carry with them because, of course, yes, you wanna savor those good moments, you wanna savor the the good times you have with your family and your friends, But we also forget to savor those bad moments and remember what we can learn from them.

And there's a book I reference a lot, keep it near my desk, and it's a book that general James Mattis carried around with him the whole time he was in Iraq, and it's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. And the reason why I love this book, it's an it's an example of stoic philosophy, but Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and during his reign, he went on many, many conquests. And they they call it the golden age of the Roman Empire. You know, he had so much power, but this book is a series of reflections of him trying to ground himself. And he wrote it down to kind of remind himself to stay grounded, to to not think that he was above being human, and to remember that he was mortal and that he was gonna die someday and that he wanted to get more out of life, I guess you could say.

One of the quotes from that book is never let the future disturb you. You will meet it if you have to with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. Right? And I think that's kind of what's what's going on here. We're we're also scared of the future.

We're we're not thinking in the now right now. We're not thinking on a day to day basis of, you know, what we can do at the moment to to to make things better. We're thinking about what's gonna happen as far as what's gonna be taken away from us and what's going to be pushed on us. And it could be because of all these new facets of social media, you know, they're they're great in that they help us communicate, but they're also horrible in that they keep us away from the present moment and they keep us away from what we could be enjoying here in this life. And like I said, that that that comes with both the tragedy and and the good.

And so on days like this, I think the biggest thing that we can all do is to really go back to those ancient teachings and and to remember what life is. Life is a temporary moment in time where we get to occupy this earth, we get to occupy this space and we get to make the most out of it. And we have to be reminded of that constantly because when we're not reminded of it, when we're not when we get our heads somewhere else, it tends to make us more bitter, vile, disgusting people. And I think that on a day on a day like this when we lost so much, for us to continue to tear into each other without focusing on what we should be learning from this situation, what we should be learning about life from this situation is awful. So that's about all I got for today.

I hope that made sense. Sometimes I'm literally just talking out of my ass up here. But, you know, at the end of the day, I I want you to all go home to your families. I want you to hug your loved ones. And just like my loved one is crawling behind me right now and trying not to be on camera, I want you to go home and hug your loved ones and and I want you to enjoy every single minute of this, my two loved ones back there.

And and and enjoy the good, enjoy the bad, learn from both. And that's about it, guys. So we've got some great interviews lined up for you this week with Mark Sisson, the author of the Primal Blueprint and the twenty one day keto reset. Later this week, I'm gonna be interviewing doctor Dominic D'Agostino, who's been a guest on both Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan. He's one of the leading researchers on ketosis, and we're gonna have another Warrior Soul health talk for you as well where we deliver tips, tools, and tactics to help you to to get fit.

And if there's anything else I can do for any of you, any anything at all as far as content, let me know. We're always open here to suggestions on the Warrior Soul podcast. So have a good night, guys. Talk to you later.