Years ago, for reasons I could not fully explain, I found myself moving in the opposite direction of everyone around me.
People were talking about The Sopranos. They loved it.
I tried.
More than once.
I could appreciate the acting. I could see the craftsmanship. I understood why people were drawn to it.
But I never enjoyed it.
Then came The Wire.
Again, I tried.
Everyone said it was brilliant. Everyone said it was important. Everyone said I simply needed to give it another chance.
I did.
Several times.
Yet something in me remained unmoved.
Then came Breaking Bad.
The same story.
The same recommendations.
The same praise.
And the same feeling that this was not for me.
At the time, I thought perhaps I was missing something.
Maybe I was.
But as the years passed, I began to realize I was not rejecting great storytelling.
I was becoming sensitive to what those stories required me to sit with,
so many of them invited me to spend hours living inside darkness.
Crime, violence, manipulation, corruption, and Greed.
The slow collapse of the human spirit.
The older I became, the less interested I was in making those places my home, even temporarily.
What surprised me most was that the change did not stop there.
Movies I once enjoyed began losing their appeal.
Military films.
Action movies.
Stories built around guns, revenge, and destruction.
Eventually I found myself turning away from anything that seemed determined to convince me that darkness was depth.
Then I began noticing something else.
Many stories no longer seemed interested in heroes.
Even stories that claimed to be about heroes often spent most of their time glorifying villains.
The villain was smarter.
The villain was more interesting.
The villain got the best lines.
The villain became the person audiences secretly admired.
Goodness became boring.
Decency became weakness.
Kindness became naïveté.
And somewhere along the way, I realized I was growing tired.
Not physically.
Spiritually.
I began asking myself a simple question.
What am I feeding my mind?
We understand this concept when it comes to food.
No one is surprised when a person feels different after changing their diet.
Yet we often act as though the soul can consume endless negativity without consequence.
Hour after hour.
Day after day.
Year after year.
Violence.
Conflict.
Anger.
Fear.
Contempt.
Cynicism.
Then we wonder why peace feels so difficult to find.
So I started making changes.
Not dramatic changes.
Just intentional ones.
I became more selective about what I watched.
More selective about what I listened to.
More selective about the conversations I participated in.
I began paying attention to the words I spoke.
I tried to spend less time discussing people and more time understanding them.
Less time dwelling on problems and more time looking for solutions.
Less time feeding outrage and more time feeding gratitude.
Something changed.
Not overnight.
But slowly.
Quietly.
The way sunrise arrives.
You do not notice it all at once.
Then suddenly the darkness is no longer where it was.
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Resources for Hard Times
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