Tomorrow’s happiness is today’s anguish

I’ve thinking about the future allot in my life and I realised sometime back now that I kept thinking that things would be better in the future that for many reasons tomorrow was going to the way today should be.

When I get that new computer, when I get that car I always wanted, when I have a house, a new flat etc. but really thinking that the future will bring us happiness just gives us an excuse to be unhappy or unsatisfied today.

This allows us to avoid taking the steps that would make our everyday life better now.

I like to call it the “live today, be happy tomorrow paradox”.

As we move along in life, as everyday appears to be a collection of small or big problems we waste our lives saving up to be happy as if the future was something guarantied to be better but as I see it, it only leads to bad days, terrible weeks and a shit life.

We focus on today’s problems when we should focus on the bright sides because at the end of the day that’s all we are going to get, however much money we make, and however successful we become.

Dr Frankl in his brilliant book “Mans search for meaning” demonstrates that we are all looking for meaning and that all our materialistic desires are deprived of it.

The question that naturally springs is hence, what is our meaning in life; sadly this is something we must each discover alone.

Fighting the urge to complain

In regard to my post about happiness I had a testing experience with British Airways this weekend because of the less than honest practise of overbooking.
Not moaning about it really helped me enjoy the 4 star hotel I fought to spend my night in Paris in, instead of being with my girlfriend Chili who lives and works in London.
I guess rationalising the whole situation and getting the better of it made it all ok but it was a challenge to avoid sinking into a string of complaints that would have totally taken down my moral.
Its always interesting when you believe you have developed a way of avoiding the horror of perpetual complaining, to have test like these thrown at you randomly as if someone up there said "hmm ok you think you got it all sorted out, now eat this"

Happiness

I spend allot of time wondering what I truly believe in and what are the things in my life that make me a happy person.

As I got older and I got to understand myself a bit better I realised on of the main contributors to my happiness was the lack of energy I would direct at things that made my life complicated and frustrating.

I am no nihilist, nevertheless my experience with situations that cause me to worry or feel stressed has led me to device strategies to avoid letting these situations ruin my life.

The main idea here is that the more energy I’m going to feed into a displeasing situation the more the situation will reduce my general happiness.

Ignoring small everyday situations and not complaining about them breaks the loop in which I have found myself entangled in so many times.

I walk down the road and realise I forgot my subway pass and I’m late for work, at that moment two options open to me in how I deal with the situation:

1 I moan about it, I complain and I run back to get my pass believing this is the first of a series of events that’ll ruin my day as if I had gotten up on the wrong foot.

2 I laugh about it, I let the situation slide of me giving it no importance at all and I get my pass from my house.

Either way I'm gonna be late.

Obviously option 2 is the better choice because life is full of situations that’ll make it a hassle.

The idea is too ignore the situations that are of no importance and to concentrate with dealing with the ones that do matter at a deeper level. This approach has the advantage of giving me the necessary energy to concentrate on the important things instead of wasting it on unimportant events that I most of the time have no control over.

It is so easy to make our lives a living hell by letting small things condense into bigger and bigger issues and problems, cutting the grass under a situations foot pre-emptively allows me to go about my life in relative happiness.

We all have strategies to cope with life’s situations it would be great if we could share them here together.

I think the most important thing to remember is that many small problems lead to bad days, terrible weeks and at the end of the day a shitty life. That’s what I try to avoid.