I was a stubborn kid and I have been a kind of risk-taker (or a rebel if you want to put it that way) for my whole life. It’s just that when it’s the time to walk away, I just walk away not caring about the consequences.
I have done this plenty of times in my life and realized that in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Things might spike up a little bit, people might talk about you for a while, but things always get back to normal. People have bigger things to worry about than you (believe me, they’ve got a lot of other shit going on in their life). If you don’t take action and do what you really wanna do, it’s your fault.
About Happiness
In the twenty years that I have spent on this planet, I have never achieved long-term happiness by getting somewhere or achieving something.
Take materialism as an example, the thing you buy now will be ordinary to you after some weeks. It’s almost always like this.
Heck, even if it’s an individual you are trying to chase, once you chase them you might end up getting bored of them after some months (talking from experience :P).
Attaining your happiness from achieving something external is like a never-ending vicious circle. Once you get “there” from “here”, you’ll have to get somewhere else. Once you achieve a specific goal, you’ll be setting your next goal to keep yourself indulged in this process of chasing something. That my friend is a perfect way to live your life trying to be truly happy and just die doing so.
So, what’s the solution? How do we achieve eternal happiness?
Here’s the thing that I picked up from eastern philosophy. “Now, in the present moment, you have got everything that you need to be happy.” This might seem dumb at first but once you completely grasp it you’ll know what I mean by this.
The moment you stop depending on external stuff to be happy you become truly happy.
Do What You Enjoy, Before It’s Too Late…
I have had my fair amount of existential dread in the past few years. It all led me to read books like “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari or “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Victor Frankl but what really clicked my mind were those tiny extractions of lectures given by Alan Watts. I ended up listening to complete lectures. Man, he had this really soothing voice and he really knew how to convey his message. It was like he mixed all that Taoism in some liquid and injected it into my mind.
Back in the time when I was a self-improvement enthusiast I learned about this trick of writing your thoughts on a raw paper every morning. I kinda end up turning it into self-therapy. I acted as a third person (my own therapist) and educated myself about what did I need to change by writing it all down.
This trick helped me in so many ways.
There was always something new, some other way of thinking that I discovered once I wrote my thoughts down.
I did this a while ago before starting this article and couldn’t resist turning it into this article.
“Enjoy what you do.” You must have heard this phrase before but in reality, it’s actually the other way round. “Do what you enjoy.” That’s a piece of advice we all need to follow.
By enjoying, I didn’t just mean leisure or entertainment, I rather take enjoyment as something that grows us as a person, something that’s creative, or something that’s a learning experience.
Entertainment-related stuff is someone else’s story that amuses you. Believe me, you really need to start living your own story rather than lurking on someone else’s.
Once you get your parameters of success straight, it all gets easier. Have you ever wondered about questions like what if someone’s eternal goal is to be unsuccessful? Will they be successful or unsuccessful once they achieve it?
Now don’t think that I’m telling you to be unsuccessful, I’m just saying that once we set our parameters of success to something like “enjoying our stay on this planet”, it doesn’t really matter if you’re successful in other people’s eyes.
Death is certain. We all know this fact. You don’t remember billions of years before you were born and there’s a chance that you end up dead forever after you die. It’s this one opportunity you’ve got to enjoy yourself and do what you truly wanna do. Don’t waste it living achieving success which is defined by someone else.
P.S.
I don’t write regularly because it’s something that I just enjoy doing as a side hobby and I really don’t write until I feel like writing.
I sometimes feel like my brain is hazy and my thoughts are foggy. I feel like I lack words to express what I truly wanna express but maybe it’s just part of the play. Maybe one day I’ll be able to truly express my thoughts through my words or maybe not.
