Are you happy with your life?

Is this what you want or what you’ve accepted?

I want you to take a minute (or five, ten, even an hour) and look at your life. Think of all aspects of it from career, romantic, platonic, living situation, money situation and just your life as a whole. If it helps, make a list, thinking through each area of your life. Perhaps your life doesn’t look the way you want it to. I know if I just look at my life, it looks like a total failure.

Let’s try something else really fast.

How do you feel about those same things in your life? Do you have a romantic love life? Do you have quality friends who build you up and support you? Do you have a roof over your head? Heat to keep you warm? Access to transportation to go places? How about a career or job?

If you generalize these senses, look and feel, they can be vastly different than expected when applied to your life. Think about a beautiful cloth or garment, it’s beautiful but when you get up close and touch it, perhaps it’s rough or not what you expected. It looks great but you’re not satisfied with it once you inspect it closer.

So now think about what you saw and felt when you looked at your life.

I don’t know many people that are happy with where they are at this moment in time. We hold such expectations for ourselves that are too high and cannot be met making us feel like failures. I know everyone told you when you were young to dream big, but we’re adults now. We can be real. You can dream big, but with your life, dreaming big doesn’t really matter, it's what can be achieved.

As humans we can be self-denying, a detriment to ourselves by setting goals too high that make them unreachable. We also self-sabotage because it makes us feel that we are being selfish or irresponsible for being happy or having more than we need. We have this set idea of who we are and when we begin changing our perception, wants, and needs, it begins to change who we are. Which can send us into a panic because we’re not the same person we were before, where we were comfortable.

Perhaps you had an unfavorable childhood that forced you do adopt adaptive behaviors to your circumstance. As an adult those circumstances change and your life is different but the behavior still remains acting now as a block. We learned how to adapt as a child to unfavorable circumstances but as an adult, we don’t like to push ourselves into the unknown so we may purposely seek to destroy things like promotions, relationships, friends, or anything that could improve our life. We may even try to find things that remind us of unpleasant childhood experiences as we’ve learned to navigate those waters. We like to stay in our comfort zone.

By living a happy, healthy life we can also tend to feel guilty. Perhaps you feel undeserving of the place you live, the promotion or job you’ve been offered, or the person who loves you. We tend to see the bad in ourselves, we think about bad things we done or said and feel we don’t deserve better. Which is completely untrue. We deserve whatever we want, if we want the best, we should get the best, but we do have to work for it. Rarely are things handed to you in life.

We also tend to compare our lives to the lives of others, becoming envious of what they have that we don’t. But we can't see what other people have gone through, what they've done, or how hard they've worked to get where they are currently.

When it comes to being happy, we have to realize a few things.

First, to be truly happy in one area of life, means becoming less happy in another. If we want to get ahead at work, we work hard, longer hours, take on more projects, do what we have to but then our social lives and relationships may take a turn. To have a dream home and relationship we have to put in constant work for a healthy relationship and we have to keep working at that meaning sometimes we must turn down spur of the moment fun or social engagements.

Second, Humans also possess this fun little quality call "optimistic bias". Optimistic Bias simply means, we always think the future is going to be better than the present. So we tend to think in the future, we're thinking ahead most times and not the present. So we're missing out on human experience.

Third, We also practice what’s known as the Pollyanna principal which basically says we relive and remember the pleasant things while we tend to block off or ignore the negative things. So we spend our time looking back at things, I'm sure you're guilty of this like I am. "Wasn't it so awesome when we did....." and we think of good times. Not where we're currently at in life or how we get ahead.

Fourth, We set goals thinking to ourselves, if I can reach this goal I’ll be happy. We reach our goal, but happiness is fleeting. Once we achieve the goal, what’s left? Nothing, you met the goal. You reached the end. So are you finally happy? Nope, you set a new goal and start working on that. We may not want to realize it but happiness may only last us a small moment but as humans we are made to continue striving for better and more challenging obstacles to conquer.

Look at runners. Most people hate running, even some professional runners. But they hit this point when their body wants to quit but they force themselves painfully on and achieve what is called a runners high. A euphoric moment of happiness knowing they continued on (and the brain giving them some feel good chemicals) and they reached their goal.

If you look from the evolutionary standpoint, we become dissatisfied with our present circumstances, we create dreams and goals for our future, work towards them striving for happiness, and remembrance of happy memories have us strive to find more of that feeling. Memories can be like a drug, you're always seeking that high you get when you're happy.

Alright, if you've read this far, perhaps it's time to take stock of your life again. Realize you’re content with your life or working towards that, but being human, you’ll always be slightly dissatisfied because you were made to keep reaching for goals. You were made to challenge yourself to become better. Think of how dull your life would be if right now was the best it was going to get and you had no options to change your life or yourself. You’d be pretty unhappy right about now, I’m sure.

How we see our lives and how we feel about our lives are two very different things. But how we feel about our lives is what really matters.

So your living situation isn’t what you want but look around you apartment/house/studio/bedroom/basement/whatever but is it warm? Does it give you shelter?

Or you’re unhappy with your partner right now, think of some of these things. Are they supportive? Do they care for you? Are they putting in equal or more work into the relationship? Do you love them? Are you perhaps just bored or falling into the trap of emotional cheating?

Your job. Have you reached your highest potential within the company? Are you valued? Do you feel encourage to do better? Are you passionate about your work? Have you considered a change of careers?

There is no such thing as a perfect house, a perfect partner, a perfect life, or even the perfect job. Life is what you make it and what you make out of it. It’s about the experience of being present and enjoying everything life offers you. It’s accepting what you have while you strive for better. It’s for setting new goals or achievements. It’s accepting happiness in what you have in your current state but not settling.

Vibe Higher,

Lobeless