With a client today, we were talking a bit about the stresses at work due to a lot of disruption, none of it positive. However, we then moved onto the world in general and again, very little positive came up, especially around the way we operate as a society. But then, he was saying how he and his partner have been discussing doing things, not putting them off until later - no matter what it is.
Live in the moment.
So much of the rhetoric around "living in the moment" focuses on doing the enjoyable stuff, but as we discussed, that is not the point at all. It is about being present and doing what is necessary now, even if it is not enjoyable. Living in the moment, doesn't mean being happy, and as I went on to say to my client,
Be happy being unhappy.
Unhappiness gets a bad rap in today's culture, where we have been conditioned to believe that we should be happy, as if that is our natural state and if we are not happy, something is wrong.
That is the point of unhappiness!
But the goal isn't to always be unhappy, it is to continually be unhappy with different things, so that as one is solved, another is discovered. This is how we have evolved, where if we are unhappy doing something, we find a way to innovate so we can do less, or avoid it all together. But, we should never be satisfied with our lives, because we have developed a problem finding and solving mechanism in our body so we keep can evolving.
Happiness is in creating solutions.
It doesn't have to be solving climate change or the energy crisis, but we keep on advancing through the problems we love. We get better and better, the more we apply our creative selves to fix something useful. But we have broken the mechanism, because while this used to be a daily occurrence presented by our environment, we have engineered our experience so that we do not face problems in the same way, nor do we have to think about a solution, because we can effortlessly obtain one at our fingertips.
As I read the other day, if we were happy washing our clothes in the river, we would never have created a washing machine and would still be doing so. And the problem now is not only that we don't have to create a solution, we often don't even see the problems, because we are too busy being happily distracted. Unhappiness is a discomfort we can avoid through creative process, but we can also avoid it be distracting ourselves from the problems so we don't experience them. They don't go away, this is just a strategy to limit discomfort. And the more we do it, the less capable we become and the greater the intensity of discomfort gets when we experience it, which means it gets triggered by decreasing amounts of stress, or by situations and events we have no control over.
Live in the moment.
Okay, so that means doing what is necessary even when we don't like what we must do. Perhaps it is the dishes or the laundry, or perhaps it is getting up off the couch and unhappily getting yourself to the gym to exercise. The fact is that the more we do the stuff we don't want to do but should, the less of it we will end up having to do and the more time we will have to spend on the things we enjoy. Not only that, when we take care of what we must first, we don't have it hanging over our heads when we do the what we want to do. We can enjoy dessert, knowing that the vegetables are already eaten.
But if we ignore the uncomfortable tasks until later, even if we are able to block them out for a time, they will pile up until no matter how hard we try, they will demand our attention, steal our psychological peace, and clamour until they are heard. And by then, the mountain that has grown becomes stressful.
Avoiding stress isn't about making work easier, it is about doing what is necessary to be done *before doing the unnecessary. Of course, from an employment perspective reasonable volumes have to be taken into account, but it is the same in the personal space. Life should have some enjoyable tasks, but they should generally wait until the necessary tasks are done, because it is they that lay the foundation required to develop.
Unhappiness is a growth mindset.
Not depression.
Unhappiness is different to depression. Be unhappy with yourself and improve your condition in those areas. Be unhappy with your garden and grow something beautiful. Be unhappy with the state of the world, and change it. Investigate, learn, discover, and formulate solutions to make a difference in what you are unhappy with. Don't avoid experiencing unhappiness, change the environment that creates it.
And once perfect, acknowledge that nothing is perfect.
Get unhappy with something again and fix it until you are happy enough to move to the next item. Life is like owning a house, it requires maintenance work and repair, and once it is all done, it will need to be updated and repeated, again and again. You don't brush your teeth once and that is enough, nor do you eat once and that will get you through life. It is an ongoing list of tasks that change over time, but can never be fully completed.
Sources of unhappiness are endless.
And by extension, so are sources of happiness, because we get joy out of finding solutions to the problems we and others face. And joy doesn't mean pleasure or happiness, nor does it mean feeling good physically or mentally. Joy is a personal experience of delight, and it can be hard won by solving problems that matter to us or others. Joy is contentment, and that comes through holding together enough of what we are satisfied with. But as you know, we are never truly satisfied, because we see problems. Which means that joy and contentment is a cyclical process and the component that we keep avoiding that holds us back from having it, is unhappiness.
We need to be unhappy.
Unhappiness is opportunity and potential to put our skills to use, to learn and grow, and to do something that matters to us or the world by finding a solution to the cause. Don't avoid unhappiness, get to the root of why, and get to work.
Taraz
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