Pendulums: The Invisible Energy Vampires Stealing Your Focus

Most people spend their lives feeding systems that were never designed to help them succeed.

These energy structures —Reality Transurfing book calls them Pendulums— exist solely to extract your attention, emotion, and effort while pulling you away from what actually matters to you. I first ran into this concept in Vadim Zeland's Reality Transurfing, and honestly? It fundamentally changed how I see everything around me. Once you understand Pendulums, you can't unsee them. They're everywhere, and they're hungry.

What Makes a Pendulum

Here's the thing about Pendulums—they're not evil conspiracies or deliberate plots. They're just... structures created by collective thought energy.

When groups of people radiate energy at the same frequency, they form these energy systems. Organizations, religions, political movements, social media platforms, news outlets—all Pendulums. Their primary goal is stupidly simple: receive energy from adherents. They showcase success stories and create emotional triggers specifically designed to keep you engaged, reactive, and feeding them.

Think about your company's culture for a second. It demands loyalty, conformity, specific working hours, participation in meetings that could've been emails (we all know those). It doesn't care if you have a side project that could change your life. It needs your energy during peak productive hours—your best hours.

Or consider political parties. They don't want nuanced thinkers who agree on some issues and disagree on others. They want soldiers who wear the jersey, share the posts, attend the rallies, and hate the other side. That hatred? That's pure energy transfer. You're feeding the machine.

Social media platforms are particularly efficient Pendulums—and I say this as someone who's built email platforms for 15 years, so I know exactly how these systems work. They've engineered infinite scroll, notification systems, and algorithms specifically to capture your attention. Every like, comment, share, and rage-click feeds the system. The platform doesn't care if you're happy or miserable. It only cares that you're engaged.

You open Instagram to check one message and emerge 40 minutes later having fed the Pendulum your most valuable resource: focused attention you could've spent building something that actually matters to you.

The Puppet Strings of Emotion

Mass media dominates with bad news for a reason, and it's not the reason they tell you.

Anxiety, fear, anger, hatred—these emotions attune your thought energy to the Pendulum's frequency. Each time you react emotionally to a news story, political debate, or viral controversy, you're yanked by invisible strings. The Pendulum grows stronger while you grow more drained.

Here's what I learned: close yourself off to bad news. Remain open to good news. This isn't ignorance—it's energy preservation.

Watch yourself the next time you read breaking news about some crisis, scandal, or outrage. Notice the physical sensation—the tightness in your chest, the surge of cortisol, the impulse to share it with someone or post about it. That's the hook setting. The Pendulum just captured you.

Now you'll check for updates. You'll read opinion pieces. You'll argue with strangers online. You'll bring it up at dinner. Meanwhile, that business idea you had? That book you wanted to write? That skill you planned to learn? All postponed because you're busy feeding the news cycle.

I stopped watching news entirely three years ago. People warned me I'd be uninformed, out of touch, naive about world events. The opposite happened—and I mean the complete opposite. I became more informed about things that actually affect my life and business. I read deeply instead of consuming shallow breaking news. I choose what deserves my attention rather than letting media algorithms choose for me.

The result? More energy, clearer thinking, better decisions. The world keeps spinning just fine without my emotional reactions to every manufactured crisis.

The Trap of Foreign Goals

Pendulums showcase "favorites" as examples to follow—the successful entrepreneur, the ideal body type, the perfect lifestyle. The message is always "Do as I do."

This creates desire to chase goals that were never yours to begin with. These foreign goals feel attractive because they seem prestigious or just tantalizingly out of reach. But here's what nobody tells you: pursuing someone else's star ensures mediocrity in your own universe. The path feels punishing because you're running someone else's race.

The startup world is absolutely full of foreign goals. Raise venture capital. Scale fast. Exit big. Get featured in TechCrunch. Speak at conferences. Build a unicorn. These become default goals that founders chase without ever asking if they actually want them.

I've watched entrepreneurs make themselves miserable pursuing venture funding when they'd be genuinely happier building a sustainable, profitable company at their own pace. But the Pendulum says venture-backed is the only path that counts—everything else is "lifestyle business" (said with a sneer).

Fitness culture does the exact same thing. Get six-pack abs. Compete in a marathon. Follow this specific diet. Train like an athlete. These might be somebody's goals, but are they yours? Maybe you just want enough energy to play with your kids and enough strength to prevent injury as you age. That's completely valid, but the Pendulum makes you feel inadequate for not pursuing elite fitness. Social media amplifies this—everyone's highlight reel becomes your measuring stick.

The real danger is that foreign goals come with foreign values. If you chase someone else's definition of success, you'll need to adopt their priorities, sacrifice what they sacrificed, and become someone you're not. You might achieve the goal and feel completely empty because it was never yours to begin with.

I've met "successful" people—and I'm using air quotes here—who spent 20 years climbing a ladder only to realize it was leaning against the wrong wall. They fed the Pendulum their entire youth chasing someone else's dream. Don't be that person.

Your Unique Treasure

Everyone has a unique soul with its own set of goals and desires—and I don't mean that in some woo-woo spiritual way.

True success comes from breaking Pendulum rules and walking your own path. The key to success is allowing yourself to be yourself. When you chase external validation or imitate someone else's journey, you abandon your unique treasure. The Pendulum wants conformity. Your soul wants expression.

Your unique combination of skills, interests, experiences, and personality creates opportunities that only you can see and execute. I know someone who loved both programming and teaching. The tech industry Pendulum said "real engineers" work at big companies solving hard problems. The education Pendulum said teachers work in schools with credentials and curricula.

He ignored both and created coding courses that made him wealthy while helping thousands of people. That path only existed because he honored what made him unique instead of conforming to existing structures. Nobody told him to do it. There was no roadmap. He just... built it.

The Pendulum makes you believe your weird interests are liabilities. Your non-traditional background is a disadvantage. Your different approach is wrong. But these are often your greatest assets—I'm not exaggerating. The market doesn't need another generic consultant, another me-too product, another person following the playbook. It needs what only you can offer. Your specific combination of experiences creates insights nobody else has.

This doesn't mean ignore all external input or reject structure entirely. It means filtering everything through your own judgment. Take what serves your goals. Leave what doesn't. The Pendulum says "our way or you're not serious." Your soul says "I'll take what works for me and build my own way."

One path leads to being a cog in someone else's machine. The other leads to building your own machine.

The Solution: Conscious Indifference

Problems appear because you assign them disproportionate importance—full stop.

The Pendulum that creates the problem obscures simple solutions. When you battle obstacles, you attract more obstacles. End the battle. Act spontaneously with conscious awareness while keeping importance at zero. Rent yourself out—maintain conscious detachment from outcomes.

The path of least resistance contains optimal solutions that appear naturally when your mind stops interfering and you stop feeding the Pendulum.

I learned this lesson the hard way in business. Early on, every client negotiation felt like a battle I had to win. Every pricing conversation was a test of my worth. The importance I assigned to each deal made me desperate, which made clients sense weakness, which made negotiations harder. I was feeding the Pendulum of scarcity and competition.

When I shifted to conscious indifference—caring about doing good work but not attaching my identity to any single outcome—everything changed. Clients sensed confidence. Negotiations became easier. Better opportunities appeared because I wasn't grasping at them.

Conscious indifference doesn't mean not caring. It means not inflating importance. The difference is crucial—and most people miss this. You can care deeply about your work while remaining indifferent to whether this specific client says yes. You can want to succeed while being indifferent to whether it happens this month or next. You can have strong opinions while being indifferent to whether others agree.

This removes the emotional hooks Pendulums use to control you.

Think of yourself as an actor playing a role. You bring full commitment to the performance without believing you ARE the character. You rent yourself out to the production while maintaining internal freedom. Apply this to work, relationships, goals. Play your role fully while knowing you're not defined by the role.

The Pendulum wants you to identify completely with your position, your status, your achievements. Conscious indifference lets you participate without being consumed.

The path of least resistance appears when you stop forcing outcomes. You've experienced this—the problem that solved itself when you stopped obsessing over it. The opportunity that appeared when you stopped desperately seeking it. The relationship that improved when you stopped trying to control it.

This isn't passivity. It's active non-resistance. You keep moving, keep working, keep trying, but without the energetic strain of attachment to specific outcomes. The Pendulum loses its grip when you stop fighting and stop feeding.

Break Free and Build Your Own Path

Here's what I want you to understand: you have a choice right now.

You can keep feeding the Pendulums—checking the news, chasing foreign goals, comparing yourself to favorites, inflating importance, and wondering why you're exhausted and unfulfilled. Or you can stop. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Right now.

Start small. Pick one Pendulum that's draining you and consciously detach from it. Stop checking that news site. Unfollow those Instagram accounts that make you feel inadequate. Quit that committee that demands your time but serves their agenda. Say no to that meeting that could be an email.

Feel the energy return to you. Notice how much clearer your mind becomes. Watch how opportunities appear when you're not constantly reacting to external demands.

Then ask yourself: what would I build if I stopped feeding everyone else's systems and started building my own? What would I create if I ignored the favorites and honored my unique combination of skills and interests? What would my life look like if I only pursued goals that were truly mine?

The answers to these questions are your unique treasure—and nobody can tell you what they are. No guru, no mentor, no success story can hand you your path. You have to discover it by being yourself, not by imitating someone else.

The Pendulums will keep swinging. They'll keep showcasing favorites. They'll keep creating emotional triggers. They'll keep demanding your energy. But you don't have to feed them anymore.

Walk your own path. Build your own thing. Define your own success. The world doesn't need another copy—it needs what only you can create.

Stop feeding the Pendulums. Start feeding your soul.