Yes—that is a serious proclamation in the title. There's a reason Marina made 2 albums with them as the name after all! And I’m going to use the next few thousand words or so to show you why that is, why it matters, and how understanding the movement of these two forces can make your life practically better.

‍

If you’re a tl;dr person not here to read an essay, skip to the last section. I’ll forgive you. But like, idk, maybe work on that attention span? This ain’t TikTok! (Though I do occasionally yap there too)  

‍

If you don’t know me (hi, btw), I like to say that I straddle duality daily. One part of me is a technology and product design executive who thrives on hustle culture, grit, building the next exciting thing, creativity, and trying to make sure AI doesn’t actually kill us.

‍

There’s another part of me that is a life coach and yoga teacher that is all about slowing down, mindful awareness, deep inquiry, and exploring the boundaries of what Joseph Goldstein likes to call “absolute” and “relative” reality.

‍

So I know that talking about love and fear and claiming those are the only two forces that really matter in the world sounds pretty woo-woo—like something your friend’s mom who has a shrine of crystals at home might say.

‍

But I want to be explicit with you—this understanding has also changed how I show up at work, with my friends, my partner, my family, and in very many other practical, relative reality places.

‍

My goal here, and in most places you’ll see me write, is to juice the practical learnings from the esoteric and the ancient and make them relevant for you, the modern reader. Translation—I know you’re busy, stressed, and tired so I read all the things for you and can now yap about the most important bits to you on this platform. It’s like I’m out here reliving my high school years of being the smart kid everyone cheated on. But this time, it’s voluntary!

‍

So without much more ado—let’s get into this exploration of love and fear. But first, I wouldn’t be a good content designer if I didn’t define my terms clearly.

‍

Love and fear are not what you think they are

‍

When I speak of love, I’m not talking about romantic or sexual love. I am talking about an attitude, or posture, of acceptance. In the West, we hear love and think it means kissing our partner or hugging our kids, or God forbid, Love Island. But for the sake of this essay, understand that love is synonymous with acceptance. Love is anytime you say “this thing is allowed to be here in my reality here and now.”  

‍

This is also true for love’s opposite, fear. When I talk about fear, I don’t mean panic or terror. I mean the opposite posture of love—non-acceptance. You step into fear any time you take the position of “it is unacceptable for this thing to exist here and now in my reality.”

‍

No matter what is happening to us at any given moment in our lives, we get to take one of these two postures. We can choose to accept that the thing is here or is happening, or we can bite down and try to reject its presence.

‍

You can probably see that doing the latter is a fool’s errand, because reality does not give a shit about your preferences for what should or should not happen. Yet, for some reason, our brains do this all the time with so many micromoments in our lives.

‍

You probably understand the futility of shaking your fist on a rainy day and demanding it be a sunny day. You probably don’t start thinking, “well it SHOULD have been a sunny day, like c’mon?!”

‍

But what about when you miss the train to work? Is it “ah I missed the train, whatevs” or is it “FUCK I should have been faster, I should have left earlier, and also the MTA should suck less”?

‍

When you lose a loved one, is it “this is brutal, but this is how it is” or is it “this should not have happened and you should still be here with me”?

‍

In the aggregate, we easily grok that choosing love and acceptance is the path of peace, but when the stakes are more personal and intimate, we fall apart. We choose fear and dig our heels into non-acceptance. And I say “we” because we, as human beings, literally do this all the time.

‍

There are teachings from Eastern philosophy that believe part of our entire purpose for being on this planet is to learn how to escape this wheel, referred to as samsara. I think there is some truth in that.

‍

But I’m not here just to spiritually prognosticate, remember? I’m here to make this helpful and specific to you. So before we get into how one chooses love more often, we have to explore some common illusions fear uses to trick you into choosing it.

‍

Understanding these requires a deep degree of insight and exploration. That means I’m not asking you to take me at my word. If you disagree with anything I’m about to say in the next few paragraphs, I ask that you go investigate the claims based on your own lived experience and try to disprove them.

‍

A real spirituality isn’t born from stories or blind faith—it’s born from insight, investigation, and a knowing that runs deeper than the conceptual mind. Kind of like how I know the yellow Starburst is the best one. Do not @ me.

‍

3 illusions that keep you picking fear

‍

1). You think you have control over your reality. Yet, you obviously do not.

‍

This lesson was the hardest for me to understand. And it is consistently the hardest for my overachieving coaching clients to get, too. Something about being in the ’90s instilled this unshakeable belief in me that I could do or be absolutely anything that I wanted to be.

‍

As a 34-year-old man, I know that that belief has a kernel of truth in it. But it’s not the whole story.

‍

We can see this simply. If you could control your reality, why would any of your loved ones have to die? Why would YOU have to die? Why would you ever miss a train to work, or get hurt or upset? It’s obvious to see that reality has a mind of its own, right?

‍

And typically this is the part where a client says “ya duh Mike but I still have some control, right? Like I’ll never get abs if I don’t go work out—I control that process, don’t I?”

‍

And still the answer is—nah, not really.

‍

You certainly control the intention of getting up and going to the gym, and the action that springs forth from that.

‍

But what happens when you go to the gym and you break your leg on the way? Or when an urgent work crisis prevents your workout? If you could control the process of getting abs, these things wouldn’t happen, right?

‍

Even more obvious—do you think you control whether or not the lights are on in your home? It’s pretty easy; you walk in, hit a switch, and they turn on. Control, right? Until the power grid goes out and you’re flipping the switch back and forth to no avail.

‍

So point blank, no—you don’t have control. Control is an illusion because we are all subject to the whims of reality. You do not make your life happen. You move through life with intentions, and those intentions become actions. Consistent actions tend to get you the results you want over time. But this living thing is fragile and wild and not a single one of us is really in the pilot seat.

‍

And by the way—your mind hates that.

‍

It hates it so much that it invents reasons and scenarios that prevent you from seeing that there’s no control. This is the birth of our “shoulds.” The train should have arrived on time. My partner should not have cheated on me. I should have gotten that job. This is your mind helping you skirt the obvious, existential truth: life does not give two shits about your preferences.

‍

You know what it’s like to be wrapped up in the way it “should have” been. It is miserable and painful and it is that way because your mind, sneakily, got you to choose fear (non-acceptance) with all its tantalizing “shoulds.”

‍

And those shoulds are so easy to indulge because—

‍

2). You think you have a “self” that’s permanent and defined

‍

If you’re a Buddhist or yogi you’ll recognize this as the teaching of anatta, or no-self. And before you have an existential panic attack like I did when I first learned this (that’s a story for another time…) no, this does not mean that you actually don’t exist, that reality is a dream, and the world is all melting around you.

‍

What it does mean, simply, is that your idea of yourself is not yourself

‍

Still confused? I feel ya—there’s a reason they teach this to the monks last. Sorry for fast-tracking your inner Zen I guess? But anywho, let’s look at it this way.

‍

If I asked you to describe yourself to me, you’d come up with a bunch of adjectives. Mine are son, brother, husband, gay, handsome, intelligent, brave, kind, and really, really cool to name a few.

‍

There’s a person out there somewhere in this world who probably thinks that I’m not a husband (because no gay marriage ya queer!!), somehow straight (sorry to all the girls that liked me in college), really dumb, stupid, cowardly, mean, and really, really fucking lame. Yes, I also struggle to believe this person exists, but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere.

‍

The point is simply that we all have an image of ourselves that we think is permanent, is enduring, and is our “true” self. But just because we’re the ones wearing the meat suit and processing our intentions does not make this image of ourselves “true.”

‍

If you think you’re a saint, someone else thinks you’re a sinner. And the real gag is that neither person’s definition is true because there are times when you are both of these things, and many more adjectives, too.

‍

Frankly—nothing endures about you and nothing is permanent except for the fact that there is a ‘you’ underneath all of that experiencing your life (we’ll come back to that later). But your mind really likes to think that your definition is the real one because, again, you’re the one driving the meat suit and listening to all your brain’s thoughts.

‍

And that’s not really a problem, until we get into non-acceptance. Remember that missing the train example above? And how that person should have gotten up earlier and been faster? If this person believes they’re proactive and athletic, then that ‘should’ seems a lot more appealing to glom onto because it confirms their existing idea of themselves.

‍

When in reality—I might aspire to be proactive and athletic, but sometimes I also want to sleep in until noon and munch a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos in my undies. Cut a dude some slack please??

‍

The point is that rigid self-definition is itself a posture of fear and non-acceptance. It tries to make something permanent in a world that is actually constantly changing and impermanent.

‍

Oh funny I mentioned that, because it brings us so cleanly to our final illusion.

‍

3). Everything, except one thing, is impermanent in this life

‍

I am out here asking you to radically accept that your loved ones will die, your children might die, your country might get swept into war, and that you will probably experience blinding, searing pain at some point in your life.

‍

And if you’re like “fuck you dude how could you even ask a person to do that?” well, I feel ya, but my answer is because all of these things are actually impermanent. The nature of everything in this reality is that it arises, and then it falls away.

‍

Where are all of the challenges and problems of your past? Where is all the pain you experienced as a child? It’s not here in 3D reality, and if you’re pointing to yourself right now being like “well that still lives on in me,” not quite. The memory of it lives on in you, which we’ll talk about soon as well. But the thing itself is dead and gone. Like The Sopranos :(.

‍

Acceptance and love are only even possible because you can trust, with absolute faith, that every bad thing that happens to you in this life will not last and will not endure. Its nature is to eventually pass away.

‍

And the literal ONLY thing that this law does not apply to, my friend, is YOU.

‍

Not your self-definition that lives in your mind—go back and read about illusion 2 again. Not your body or your identity—those things will be dead as hell someday.

‍

But YOU as consciousness itself. As the precondition to every experience that you have had, can have, or ever will have.

‍

Think about it like this—you remember being 5, right? And you remember how, even though both your mind and body were very different than they are now, it was still obviously “you” living out those glory days on the playground as a 5-year-old? That’s consciousness and that’s the thing that I’m talking about—that thing is what you actually are.

‍

No matter what happens, your consciousness endures. If there’s no consciousness, there’s no experience. Which you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever slammed 7 shots of Malört at a bachelor party and fallen into a dreamless slumber. Not that I’d know from experience, of course.

‍

And hey, depending on your religious flavor preference, some people believe consciousness endures as a soul or a reincarnation. And if you don’t believe that, and we still agree that you’re the precondition for all lived experience, it’s almost like this true you is immortal, right?

‍

So why in the name of all that is holy would you, as the very basis of your lived reality, ever fear anything that COULD happen in said reality? You ARE reality baby!!  

‍

Ya, but obviously, sometimes we forget our own spiritual nature because we live in these fragile meat suits that get triggered and such. So let’s talk about that.

‍

Why you still get hoodwinked by fear even after a conscious awakening

‍

Ok if you made it this far, first off, THANK YOU for reading a literal essay on the internet in 2026.

‍

And second off, if the above insights triggered anything in you or you still can’t see the truth in them, my advice is to go take a break before reading on. The stuff I’m recommending below can’t really take effect until you’re on board with everything I said above.

‍

Some teachers would say you’re not really “awake” in this life until you understand the above 3 things. I’d never use such hoity-toity language. I just know from lived experience this stuff can be majorly disruptive and life-changing and while I’m putting it all out on the table here, I do want you to take it slowly and ask questions in the comments if they arise.

‍

But assuming your illusions have been dispelled and you’re willing to read on, let’s talk about why, even after you understand some of the mechanics about absolute reality, fear and non-acceptance still worm their way into your life and make you feel like shit.

‍

And before we even get there, disclaimer that you will not be perfect at this. I am most DEFINITELY not perfect at this.

‍

You will fuck up and non-accept and make things harder for yourself and that, my friends, is a part of the human experience too. So don't look at these things as a checklist that you MUST do every day and don’t view them as some kind of weird report card, please. School is over and there’s no AP Life class anyway you nerd.

‍

But anyway, here are fear’s strategies to get you hooked on it. And I’ll start with the first one I KNOW all you overachievers are definitely murmuring about right now.

‍

1). You think love and acceptance means total passivity and will prevent you from solving actual problems

‍

My type A clients hear me babble about this shit and go, “Oh so you think we should all just be flower children from the ’60s that go around and hug each other and ignore every shitty, terrible thing in the world, huh?”

‍

I mean… that sounds kind of nice? But no, that’s actually the opposite of what love and acceptance get you. Let’s use an example.

‍

Let’s imagine that there’s a big evil corporation out there doing some nefarious things. And this life coach guy on the internet told you to love and accept what life gives you. Does that mean you should invite the CEO to a potluck dinner and give him a big hug because it’s all love, fam?

‍

Fuck no! It means you should go and do something about it. But who do you think gets to wise, decisive action faster?

‍

Annie Acceptance: “Hmm this corporation is doing some shady shit and I don’t like it. I’m going to be the change I want to see in the world and start a protest against them!”

‍

Nora Non-Acceptance: “Oh my GOD how could these people be DOING this stuff in 2026? This is just, like, so unfair and I don’t even get it like they SHOULD be so much nicer and they SHOULD be putting resources here instead of there and if ONLY Hillary had won in 2016 then we wouldn’t even BE here…”

‍

Do you get the point? The person who comes into love and acceptance gets to decisive action much, much faster than the person who takes the stance of non-acceptance. That is because radical acceptance short-circuits our mind’s remarkable ability to ruminate and judge. It gets us right into reality here and now, and once we’re in that place, wise action becomes almost obvious.

‍

The same applies to any situation you might find yourself in. If your partner cheated on you, do you want to dwell on the why, the how, and how could they? Or do you want to accept that it happened and find the path forward?

‍

So the first practical tip to choose love over fear is to understand that you will get to the right, decisive action far quicker with acceptance than you do with non-acceptance. Love wants you to act; fear wants you to sit and think.

‍

When the mind gets loud and starts telling you how it should have been, short-circuit it and ask “well ok this is how it is—so what can I do about it right here and now?”

‍

And yes, by the way—I understand that you are a human being with emotions, and that in these strawman examples, these people seem to be mysteriously moving through their shit quite fast.

‍

Let’s talk more about that with fear’s No. 2 strategy.

‍

2). It can initially hurt more to choose love instead of fear and none of us like feeling hurt

‍

I think this is best seen in the extreme examples—the divorce, the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, the start of a war.

‍

Choosing love and acceptance when the really bad stuff happens is absolutely fucking searing.

‍

It is like ripping open your heart to the world and letting it all just bleed out of you, or setting yourself on fire and letting it crackle your skin. You might cry, scream, thrash, and yell. You might have to do this for days, months, or years.

‍

I would frankly rather be forced to watch nothing but #Sports for the next 5 years. I’m gay, remember? That is a bad thing.

‍

So much for that flower child vision of love, right?

‍

Regardless of how intense the inner pain is, it is very important that you commit to feeling negative emotions fully and lovingly until they’ve said what they needed to say.

‍

What would your response be if a young child came up to you crying and afraid? Would you try to push him away, or tell him all the reasons why he SHOULDN’T be crying? Or would you just pick him up, hold him, and hug him until he stopped crying EVEN THOUGH that would involve getting snot on your shirt and having everybody in the playground stare at you and judge your parenting skills?  

‍

Hopefully, the latter. Because that is the attention your inner negativity is asking from you. It needs your loving acceptance in order to fully metabolize.

‍

Yet so many of us don’t allow this. We go into mental stories about shoulds and coulds, like in the example above. Or we play the games of blame and shame, trying to find causative targets for our pain, even when the target is us. Or, the pain is so unbearable we find a chemical or a powder to blunt and assuage it.

‍

The last thing any of us want to do is just sit in the absolute, Manhattan-level cesspool of our shitty emotions and hug them tightly while the sentient rat colonies that are our negative feelings in this weird analogy nip at us.

‍

Yet this is the thing that frees us from long-term mental suffering. And subtly choosing not to do so, again and again, is how mental health disorders are born.

‍

Perhaps that sounds too 🚨woo-woo🚨 to you, so let me get some #science in the room for the left-brained among us.

‍

If you have had an anxiety disorder before, you may be familiar with something called exposure-and-response prevention therapy, or ERP. As a former sufferer of panic disorder, GAD, and OCD, I’m quite familiar with this therapy.

‍

And while you can read a bazillion scientific articles about how it works and why it’s impactful, I’ll give you the cliff notes here. ERP identifies the thing that you are absolutely terrified of and works to make you literally just sit in that terror and do nothing about it. This creates a phenomenon called fear extinction, in which, over a period of time, you are suddenly no longer afraid of the thing you were once afraid of.

‍

Sounds a lot like being eaten alive by your own emotions in a Manhattan sewer, right?

‍

Whether your angle is spirituality or psychology, the basic principle is the same. Choosing to fully feel your nasty ass feelings in their total depth, without using ANYTHING to distract yourself from them is the path of love that dishabituates you from the inner suffering you let fear trick you into holding onto so long ago.

‍

The way I describe it to my clients is simple. The next time you feel like shit inside, give the sensations that stir up in your body your full attention while your mind starts to yap louder and louder. Go deeper into your painful chest, your queasy stomach, your sweaty palms, whatever the felt thing is, just don’t get distracted by your own thoughts and don’t do anything in real life to make the pain ‘better’ or more tolerable.  

‍

For minor stuff, this will feel just a little uncomfortable. You probably do this a few times throughout your day and don’t even notice it. Think about when a Real Housewife catches a stray bullet from a fellow cast member, rages internally for a bit, but then turns it into a devastating clapback at the reunion show. Same (ish?) principle.

‍

For stuff that has been hurting you for a while, doing the work above will literally feel like you’re being forced to watch Scary Movie 6. Like you would rather cut your own liver out with a butter knife.

‍

But I swear to you that choosing love is the only way to free yourself from trapped fear. No medication, substance, or rose quartz from your Mom will do the work for you. It has gotta be you, boo.

‍

And by the way, that applies even when you’re not actively in the grip of suffering!

‍

3). Fear wants you to live your life with negation—love asks for creation

‍

The non-woo-woo way to say that is it’s easier to wake up every day and come up with a laundry list of “shit you don’t want to happen” than it is to wake up and say “here’s what I would like to have happen today.”

‍

It’s the same reason it’s a lot easier to be a critic than it is to sit here and churn out multiple-thousand-word essays.

‍

And yes, I am staring directly at you, by the way.

‍

Why is that? Again, I will point you to your poor old nervous system. The nervous system’s sole job is keeping you alive. Not happy, not thriving, and not actualized—just alive.

‍

You could decide to abandon your dreams, never leave your house again, and play video games all day (no shade to the gamers, avid PS5-er here) and your nervous system would act like a pageant mom about it—“oh my god my baby did so good, look at her just rot in place!”

‍

It’s always gonna be easier to not do the thing, to be a hater, to be a critic, and to be a Debbie Downer because those things feel safer in your body. Putting yourself out there, taking a risk, trying new things, making art, and giving it a good ol’ college try will feel like existential terror at first. Until you do them enough times and then they become second nature.

‍

So the practical tip for this one is: Wake up every morning and make a list of things you would like to have happen. Set an intention for yourself that’s positive and watch what happens to your reality.

‍

And before you pull out the 🚨woo-woo 🚨alarm on me because that sounds like I’m preaching manifestation, back up, buckaroo because there’s also some #science behind this one too.

‍

And that science is simply that our brains are really, really good at seeing the realities that they want to see, which is how you’re somehow always the person that’s in the right every time you argue with your spouse. Mysterious, right?

‍

Oh, and your brain also doesn’t really get the word “no.” For example—DO NOT THINK OF A PINK ELEPHANT RIGHT NOW!

‍

Andddd what did you just think of?

‍

The one thing I asked you not to think of? Awesome, really cool bro. I thought we had a thing there for a minute.

‍

That’s called the ironic process of mind by the way. And once you know it exists, you can use it to your advantage.

‍

You can wake up each day and say “Ok brain here’s a list of horrors I don’t want. Just gonna leave these here for you. And like, it’d be soooo crazy if, I don’t know, you actually NOTICED all these terrible things and pointed them out for me because I literally just prepared the list for you, right?”

‍

Or, you can do the opposite. Give your brain the good shit and watch what it starts to pay attention to instead. Neville Goddard who??

‍

And that’s all, folks!

‍

We’re clocking in at 5,000 words now so if you read this entire thing THANK YOU and also you’re probably in the top 0.1% of attention spans on the internet these days. Give yourself a pat on the back.

‍

And if you skipped all the way to the end to read the conclusion like I said you could do at the top. I mean… I said you could do it? But kind of rude of you, honestly. Like you totally missed all my funny one-liners and deep life-changing lessons. Make it up to me by liking and subscribing instead. Pretty please??

‍

Anywho, to recap this thang up:

‍

• When you don’t accept reality you feel like shit. When you accept reality without conditions, you feel really good.
• You don’t see how this mechanism plays out because you think you control your reality, you think you have an enduring “self,” and you don’t understand impermanence.
• If you know those three things and STILL get hoodwinked by fear, congrats, you’re human.
• But, like, if you want to work on that more, you can practice:
  

‍

1. Seeing how love gets you to decisive action faster than fear’s call to overthink and ruminate
2. Feeling your negative emotions fully and thoroughly as sensations and not thought stories
3. Telling your brain what you want to experience and feel today instead of what you don’t want to experience and feel today.

‍

I’m sure I left a bunch of shit out. I’m sure you have questions. Depending on where you’re reading this, you may be able to comment on it. If so, I hope that you do comment on it—I’ll do my best to get back to you so long as you’re nice and respectful and not a troll.

‍

If you are a troll, I will be using AI to find your address and will send your mother a stern letter.  

‍

And remember to like and subscribe so you don’t miss any of my other brain dumps.

‍

Choose love friends <3, Mike

‍

Image credit: Photo by Kristine Weilert on Unsplash.

‍