You Catch What You Put Out Bait For

I've been thinking about the laws of attraction and how what we think affects what we do when we set ourselves up for self-defeat. What got me thinking about it was a conversation about why people do things like seeking fame or accumulating wealth or power, etc. Because if those things were the end goal then it would be something of a letdown once you had accomplished it. It would be like Alexander the Great's disappointment when he had no more world left to conquer. So what's it all for, if it's not the actual goal itself? And I thought to myself that it was a misguided attempt to get love. The people who seek those things want the love of many and also the love of individuals in their personal life. They want admiration and praise and respect, which ultimately boil down to other forms of love and positive regard.

It also struck me that these people must be constantly disappointed in the kind of love they attract. The love of sycophants. The people who are attracted to money or power or fame. And there must be confused disillusionment when they realize that nobody loves them for themselves. They realize sooner or later that without whatever it was they were being loved for none of the people around them would give them the time of day. They get jaded and go into personal relationships with the expectation that nobody would love them if not for the money or power or fame. And what's ironic is that they come so close to pinpointing the problem, but they fall just short of making the connection. They're putting out bait for people who are attracted to those things and then wondering why that's what they attract. As if they somehow had it in their heads that they should be attracting something else. It never seems to occur to them that they're using the wrong bait for what they really want.

We all do it and have it done to us, whether consciously or unconsciously. People who think they don't deserve love advertise that in their body language and the way they talk about themselves. They are unconsciously putting out bait for people who are attracted to a terminal lack of self-esteem. In the meantime the people who are attracted to that are putting out bait to lure them in. It's like a fucked-up dance in which two people seek out their opposite damaged counterpart when what they really want is someone who just loves them. We tell ourselves we want love and then set about doing everything we can to sabotage it and keep it from ever happening. And who do we blame? Not ourselves. It must be women. All women. Or it must be men, or people in general. All of them. It can't be the natural result of what we're putting out there.

This is not to blame everybody for their own relationship problems. It still takes two, but I think that maybe we set ourselves up for defeat without even understanding that we're doing it. We set up a scenario in which we cannot win, perhaps because we don't think we really deserve love in the first place. We secretly believe that we deserve to be unhappy because we're not good enough to love. It strikes me as incredibly sad. What we project out into the world as a persona is meant to impress others and gain their positive regard. We want approval. Outside validation. Maybe it's worth thinking carefully about what we project out into the world and what others are projecting at us. What are we trying to get? Is what we are doing going to attract that, or are we putting out the wrong bait? If we want the love of others, maybe we need to put out the right kind of bait for people who will be interested in us for ourselves. Maybe the right kind of bait for that is simply to relax and be ourselves and believe that we are worthy of that kind of positive regard. Better yet, we can give that positive regard to ourselves and stop seeking outside validation, thus becoming someone truly worthy of being loved for themselves because they are actually being themselves.