Environment means your surroundings: the people, things and places that are nearby or around you. The environment is a very broad thing. Anything in your surroundings, near or far, that could affect you in your life, is part of your environment.

Many people are not only sure that the environment is dangerous, but that it is growing more dangerous each day. For many, it is more of a challenge than they feel they can deal with.

The fact of the matter is, however, that the environment is made to appear much more dangerous than it actually is.

A great many people are professional makers of a dangerous environment. This includes professions which require a dangerous environment for their existence, such as the politician, the policeman, the newspaperman, the undertaker and others. They “sell” a dangerous environment. If they didn’t sell a dangerous environment, they feel they would go broke. So it is in their interest to make the environment far more dangerous than it is. The environment is dangerous enough, but they make it far more dangerous.

An obvious example can be seen in newspapers. There are no good news stories. They report bad news and disaster and mostly ignore good news, making the environment seem full of threats.

Another example is a politician wishing to get elected who gives speeches about how the area is full of crime and violence which only he can do something about. Yes, crime and violence exist in the area. But he makes it seem worse than it is to get people to vote for him.

Let’s get rid of a false idea people have been given about the environment. A few years ago, somebody came up with an idea that people in certain parts of the world did not make enough progress because they lacked challenge in their environment. A challenge is something that tests someone’s abilities and requires him to use his best efforts.

One of the countries this person was thinking of was Mexico. He had probably seen a tourist poster with a picture of a Mexican, in the sun, sitting against the wall with his hat over his eyes and his shawl around his shoulders. So he said that the reason the Mexican does not succeed is that he does not have enough challenge in his environment. He said the reason people in South America were not busily making something of their countries was that they do not have enough challenge in the environment.

It’s unlikely he talked to any Mexicans or South Americans. He seems to have gotten his ideas about life by reading books written by people like him who had spent most of their time in libraries.

Here is another example of the same theory. Out in the Philippines, a white man jumps up and says to the Igorrotes (a tribe which lives in the northern mountainous region), “Now, if you will just make a path from the village down to the river and take a cart in the morning and go down to the river and fill up a water tank and bring it up here, your women will not have to be making that walk to the river. And you should carry out this project at once.” He is shocked that they do not carry it out at once. He goes away and says, “Ha-ha! Those people don’t have enough challenge in their environment. There is nothing for them to measure up to, not like us in the West. We’ve got challenge in our environment.”

This guy had challenge in his environment? His mother opened up his mouth and spooned breakfast cereal into it and his father wrote all the checks to pay for him to get through college. His way was paved in all directions with machinery and vehicles. The environment had been beaten. So of course he could stand up there and be loud and bold.

What is the real environment of an Igorrote in the Philippines, while he is sitting around a fire, listening to this person tell him how he has to make a path down to the river? He has a little boy and he thinks this is a very nice little boy. But he knows this little boy hasn’t a chance of living until he’s seven because of disease, bad food and other problems. He knows that when the rains come, they will be so heavy that every seed he planted will be flooded out of the ground and the fields will be smashed to pieces. If he can save anything out of that, maybe he might live a few months. He knows very well that all he has to do is walk under the wrong tree and get bitten by a poisonous snake and that will be the end of him. In other words, he already knows he can’t live, so why try?

It is not that there is no challenge in the environment. It’s that the challenge is overwhelming, meaning that it is so enormous that anyone could feel that he is not able to deal with it.

Some people like to tell this type of story: a young painter is living in Terre Haute, a small city in the United States in the state of Indiana. He doesn’t have any friends and he eventually moves to the big city. They make a big deal out of this. The environment offers no challenge, they say, and that’s why he moved to the big city so he would have more challenge. Really? The reason he became a painter in the first place is he didn’t want to work down at the local store with a guy called Butch Gregerty, throwing bales of hay around. This guy bullied him during kindergarten, bullied him during junior high school and bullied him during senior high school. Now he’s being asked to work for him in the local store. That’s a little bit too much challenge.

Nobody there is buying any of his paintings either. Nobody calls him “sir” or shows him respect for what he’s doing. The environment is a bit unfriendly. He doesn’t have any future, as far as he can see, as an artist. He is not able to communicate well with the people in his community, so he feels he is not contributing to it. In his line of work he faces starvation. That’s a very unfriendly environment. So he goes to a friendlier one: Greenwich Village, New York.

So we come to the conclusion that if a person has not been able to make of his life what he wants to make of it, then he is in an environment he finds overwhelming. His methods of taking care of that environment are inadequate to his survival. His existence is as apathetic or as unhappy as his environment seems to him to be overwhelming.

If we understand that discovery, we have taken a step to helping a person handle his environment better.