The Modern Millennial Perspective on the 2016 Election Results

“The remedy of all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is love…”

Ralph Waldo Emmerson

A Black Swan Event

It’s the day after Election Day. I couldn’t not post today with the unexpected turn of events; Donald Trump is elected the 45th President of the United States of America.

This is quite literally a historic event in my lifetime and for many Millennials like me.

The range of responses on social media (beginning yesterday at 11:30PM PDT) was nothing short of amazing to witness. But rather than tell you my opinion on the candidates or rant how tumultuous the next four years is going to be, instead, I’d like to offer some perspective.

This event is big enough that it impacts nearly everyone on the planet in some form or another. There aren’t many events like that that actually occur. In that sense, today’s event was like a black swan. I mean that in the sense of the book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The book focuses on the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events (outliers) and humans’ tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively. This theory has since become known as the black swan theory…The main idea in Taleb’s book is not to attempt to predict Black Swan events, but to build robustness to negative ones that occur and to be able to exploit positive ones. – The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Since we can each actively control our thoughts and actions let’s at least appreciate that this event mattered enough that it encouraged the entire country to get off their butts and exercise their right to vote. Whether or not the outcome was what you, specifically, desired is irrelevant because it’s largely outside of your hands.

We have to make the best use of what is within our power, and take the rest as it happens.

Furthermore, if I may be so bold, our universe is comprised of energy. “The truth of this Universe is that we live in an energy system that operates on the Law of Attraction. That is, we become what we think about all day long. If we think about what we hate, this is an energy that we’re offering to our desires.” I read that recently in an e-book titled ‘Being in Balance: 9 Principles for Creating Habits to Match Your Desires’ by Dr. Wayne Dyer.

He writes some powerful and insightful stuff, that Dyer. 🙂

So, to wrap up, my takeaway from today is continuing to cultivate a more positive and optimistic personal energy. The collective consciousness indicates that there is an inherent need to do better than we have been doing. Going forward, we each have a choice, every day, in how we respond to the results of the election today. Our own thoughts and actions are two things actually worth focusing on.

You made your vote count. Now make your energy count for something too.