The Universe Doesn't Care About Your Feelings

Why You Can't Go Back (And Why That's Good)

They say you can't go home again. They're wrong. You can always go home. The house is still there. The street looks the same. But it's not your home anymore, is it? It's a museum of a life you once lived. A ghost of a person you used to be. And the person looking at it isn't the same one who left.

You spend so much damn time looking backward. Scrolling through old photos, replaying conversations in your head, wondering "what if." What if you'd taken that job? What if you'd stayed with that person? What if you hadn't made that one colossal, life-altering mistake? It's a seductive trap, nostalgia. It feels warm and fuzzy, like a worn-in sweater. But it's a damn liar. The past you're remembering never existed. Not really.

The Problem: The Bullshit of Yesterday

You think you have a past. You think it's a concrete thing, a library of experiences you can pull from a shelf and examine. You believe your history defines you. That's bullshit.

The past is a story you tell yourself. A heavily edited, creatively embellished, and conveniently curated highlight reel. You remember the good parts and forget the boring bits. You amplify the pain of your heartbreaks and downplay the moments of quiet desperation. You're the unreliable narrator of your own life story. And the more you reread it, the more you believe your own fiction.

This obsession with "what was" is the single greatest waste of your energy. Regret is a useless emotion. It's a feedback loop of self-flagellation that changes nothing. It keeps you stuck, anchored to a phantom limb. You're mourning a world that has already moved on, a universe that has already expanded past that point in spacetime. While you're busy looking over your shoulder, life is happening right here, right now, and you're missing it.

Stop wasting your energy on ghosts.

The Application: Forward-Looking vs. Backward-Looking People

Once you truly internalize this, you start to see the world differently. You see two kinds of people: Forward-Looking People (FLPs) and Backward-Looking People (BLPs).

BLPs are the nostalgics, the regretful, the "good old days" crowd. They are constantly fighting the arrow of time. They resist change. They cling to outdated beliefs, old identities, and past glories. They are trying to swim upstream against the current of entropy, and it's exhausting. They are wasting precious energy trying to maintain a state that no longer exists. They are the dinosaurs waiting for the meteor.

FLPs, on the other hand, understand the game. They accept the forward flow of time. They adapt. They evolve. They are antifragile. They don't just survive chaos; they feed on it. They understand that the only constant is change, and they use that change as a catalyst for growth. They are self-organizing systems, constantly taking in new information and energy to build a more complex, more resilient version of themselves.

This is where the endocannabinoid system (ECS) comes in. The ECS is your body's master regulatory system. Its primary job is to help you adapt to a changing environment. It's the biological hardware for being an FLP. It helps you forget the unimportant, learn from the important, and stay flexible in the face of stress and change. It's the mechanism that allows you to "flow" When your ECS is functioning optimally, you are more resilient, more adaptable, and less likely to get stuck in the past.

Reflecting on my own experiences, I recognize how often I resisted change and clung to familiar patterns, even when they no longer served me. These tendencies made it difficult to adapt and grow, highlighting the importance of embracing flexibility—a principle at the core of the ECS’s role in helping us navigate life’s challenges.

You have to let go of who you were to become who you are.

The Takeaway: How to Stop Wasting Your Fucking Energy

So how do you do it? How do you stop being a BLP and start being an FLP? It's not a magic pill. It's a practice. It's a choice you make every single day.

1. Declare Energetic Bankruptcy on the Past: Make a conscious decision to stop investing energy in what is gone. Forgive yourself. Forgive them. Write it down, burn it, do whatever you have to do. But cut the cord. The past is a sunk cost. Stop throwing good energy after bad.
2. Practice Forgetting: Your brain is designed to forget. It's a feature, not a bug. The ECS helps prune away irrelevant memories. Actively help it. When a useless memory or a regretful thought pops up, acknowledge it, and then let it go. Don't feed it. Don't wallow in it. Starve it of your attention.
3. Feed the Flow: Actively seek out new experiences, new information, new challenges. This is the energy your system needs to self-organize into a more complex, more interesting version of you. Travel. Read a book on a topic you know nothing about. Talk to a stranger. Get uncomfortable. This is how you grow.
4. Tune Your ECS: Your lifestyle choices have a direct impact on your body's ability to adapt. Eat real food. Move your body every day. Get some damn sleep. Meditate. And yes, for some people, cannabis can be a powerful tool to help regulate the ECS and promote a state of adaptive flow. Do your research. Be intentional.

This isn't about "positive thinking." This is about aligning yourself with the fundamental laws of the universe. You can either fight the current and drown, or you can turn around, point yourself downstream, and ride the wave.

Closing