Great Expectations

This blog post is unrelated to the book by Charles Dickens, in case you were curious. I was just being a bit cheeky when I came up with a title for this one.

I think there’s a lot of societal expectations placed upon people these days in a way that concerns me: in particular, one of the most burdensome pressure that I’ve faced over the last few years is the idea that we should chase happiness.

It’s totally understandable that we want to be happy. After all, it’s what a lot of us live for. There are many beautiful things to life. But reality always comes with unhappy experiences, too, many of which are unavoidable as they are part of life.

Fruitful work

The last few years haven’t been that great of an experience for me in my personal life. Between relationship struggles, losing family members, friends moving away, working hard on my physical health, dealing with sleep apnea and the burnout that it caused… it’s been a challenging few years in stark contrast to the years that came prior. (I even wrote about a bunch of these.)

Compared to my twenties, I’m carrying a lot more emotions with me in my thirties, many of which I can now identify correctly. Of course, this was at its worst when I crashed due to burnout, but that was mostly caused by disturbed sleep and stress (which often accompany or cause depression).

That being said: the work that I’ve done has been fruitful. All of this work has caused significant change within me, and not in minor ways.

Living in the moment

With all of that, the pressure has been high to be happy, and to feel like I’m doing well. The idea of wanting not to be “too far behind” what other folks of my age are doing, is something I hadn’t experienced prior to a few years ago.

It may be true that everyone does things at their own pace, but that doesn’t mean you won’t lose touch with people who have entered different stages of life; it can also be very painful if you cannot have what you truly want, but people close to you don’t share your struggle.

Part of the pain is the unfortunate reality of the wandering mind: as you ponder the world that is, was and can be, you are likely to bump into some uncomfortable or sad realizations. So, ironically, pondering your own happiness is more likely to make you unhappy than happy. As such, I don’t recommend doing it too often.

It’s a lesson that took a while for me to properly take in. Being in the moment, and making sure that your average, say, weekday, is properly enjoyable and rewarding is a far more important thing to look into. Especially living in the moment.

Sitting with uncertainty

Currently, I’m reading and learning more about Buddhism, which I find quite interesting. I’m convinced I can learn useful lessons from some of the teachings of eastern spirituality, because it is much more inward-faced.

This internal state is a fascinating topic and not sufficiently the topic of conversation here in the West; the external world is generally considered to be more important here. Neglecting our internal state can have severe consequences, though.

I’m also trying to get more comfortable dealing with uncertainty. I find sitting with uncertainty to be quite challenging, and I hope it’s something I can get better at in the future, because it’s a very common issue when dealing with things beyond your control. We like to hold on to things, but sadly, everything is transient.