It gets to be habitual to feel like one's life is waiting on something.
If you grew up with any sort of lack that you were taught you could work your way out of, this is a particularly pernicious frame of mind.
It's helpful at first, which makes it deeply entrenched. There's so much evidence supporting its usefulness.
You really did work hard to change conditions, and those conditions did then improve. My question though is: Are you satisfied now? I think probably not. I think the happiness those improved conditions was supposed to bring proves to be elusive, a constantly advancing frontier. Now improving conditions is worthwhile. One doesn't want to suffer hunger, for example.
I once had to work very hard to make my way out of poverty. And today I'm retired fairly young and living a very comfortable life. Though I don't really think of myself as rich, as there are things I would buy if I was rich that I don't now have, I realize that it's all relative. There are degrees of wealth. Whether we consider our current situation "good enough" or not, is entirely a matter of our own minds. Hence this post.
This is an invitation.
I invite you to consider calling your current level of wealth good enough to justify happiness.
That doesn't mean you have everything you want. It doesn't mean you won't keep researching, experimenting, and keeping track of your results so you can continue to improve in all areas of your life, money included. It just means that you won't be waiting for a justification for your happiness to come from outside yourself.
This is the case for money, but also for marriage, children, even health ... anything that you think is an important part of your happiness in life. You must be willing to be happy with things as they are before you can see those things change to make it easier to be happy with them.
I know that sounds backwards. It's certainly the opposite of what you've been taught. But who taught it to you? Wasn't it a world filled with unhappy people?
Take a tip from someone who's actually happy. You can't wait on external conditions. Happiness truly is an inside job. Only by developing the mental discipline to feel happy because you choose to feel that way will you truly have access to reliable well-being.
You'll then stop resisting the things that would bring about external conditions conducive of enjoyment and ease. You'll stop sabotaging yourself.
People talk so much about low self-esteem, poverty mindset, self-sabotage, and so on, but so rarely do you hear talk of how one actually overcomes those handicaps. This is how.
That's the order of creation. You don't feel happy because this or that has happened or been acquired. You feel happy and thereby bring it about.
I will write more deeply about this some other time, so that you can understand why it works this way. But you don't need to know why gravity works to know not to jump out the window, do you?
Spend a week acting as if this is true, and see what happens. Record your results like a scientist.
I could be wrong, but what if I'm right?
