Truth is I need to get my mind in a better place before summer vacation 🧠

Things aren’t all bad no matter how you look at them. Still everything seem full of risk of bad things happening in my mind. I am troubled by so many things at so many levels. What I am calling delusions and hallucinations are simply common cognitive distortions – catastrophizing over what is often incomplete information.

I still can’t believe I thought that worn shock bushing was a bad wheel bearing. I so diluted myself in beleving that. And I realize my lack of clarity is just an overwhelming from the news and advertising – and all that psychedelic music I’ve been listening to and an dreaming what a grass filled haze must be like, even if it’s not really like that.

I really should turn off the push notifications from Zillow with the endless stream of vinyl-covered houses in the city that I despise. I have a solid financial path I’ve been laying down for my future, I don’t need to keep watching videos about how to be financially successful, and putting myself down when I don’t take every step the experts recommend for maximum financial success. Not everybody who is successful has a vinyl-house in the suburbs and a 20-year old “affordable and quote-un-quote reliable” Honda Civic. Am I too conservative with some of my investments? Sure, but I keep telling myself I’ll need that money soon for a truck and it’s good to keep a bit on hand for the unexpected. I also have quite a bit of market exposure via low-cost index, sector and bonds funds.

And those automobile meme posts and videos, that are always showing wheels falling off cars, and drivers who have never changed a fluid in their car, and wonder why their engine seizes. I get the 5.3l V8 on many of the Chevys isn’t perfect and I might some day throw a rocker on my truck, but hopefully not before it’s in the junkyard. The past 14 years haven’t been that bad despite all my worries and videos about disasters. Should Big Red die, I’ll just rent a car for the remainder of vacation – who cares about the cost – and the next year get a new truck. Shop says their is nothing wrong with my truck, bar of course the wobbling shock absorber.

It’s all kind of silly. I just got to get my mind in the right place before I go out on summer vacation.