Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Life Is A Miserable Thing
Wednesday, February 21, 2018This excerpt was taken from a book I`ve been recommended by my professor, called The Schopenhauer-Cure. I`ve just started reading the firs...
Of course, talking from my personal perspective, I`ve always doubted life and the meaning of it. We are all supposedly put here to search for something and to find our meaning, and yet, you come across people who say that life is meaningless and we all just try to fill up our time here in this world, but for what? If the only thing that is certain, is death, then why do anything? Why exist when we were put here without our consent and deal with negative situations over and over again, sometimes experiencing good times, and eventually die? What is the point of living your life to the fullest if you are never going to even remember it; when it`s not going to even matter to you when you die?
Thoughts like this parade my head all the time. I experience great moments in my life, and yet, they are not as prominently remembered like the bad moments. I guess you can say that I look at life in a very pessimistic way. Everything`s going good? Hah, just you wait till something terrible comes my way and then you will see how bad my life really is (*ahem*selffulfillingprophecy*ahem*). It`s pretty easy to forget the great things in life and it`s pretty easy to make a generalisation as big as 'life sucks, everything and everyone sucks and what is the point' when you`ve gone through a lot of things. But as my professor said, generalisations are a way to make it easier for you to think. It hinders you from being critical and to nuance certain concepts. Generalisations are easy to access and can readily be used. Other examples are: 'All black people are criminals' or 'I am a failure and I can`t do anything right'. Generalisations can also lead to self-fulfilling prophecies: because you believe something, you change your behaviour so much that it changes the outcome to what you`ve thought of all along. An example: 'I am a failure and I can`t do anything' so you don`t end up trying to study for an exam or find a job, and in the end, think you really are a failure because you got your results and failed or are still sitting in the basement of your mother`s house.
This whole tangent aside, reading these few sentences sparked something inside of me. It got me thinking and I`ve come to realise just how negatively I think about life and just how much negative energy I`ve been spewing out and swallowing all this time. I now agree with others to some extent; I`ve changed the way I view things, or at least try to, because everything is a process: It`s not life that sucks, it`s the situation you are in and that situation does not equate to your entire life. No matter how bad the situation and no matter how helpless you are feeling, there is still some parts of your life, no matter how little, that you can still take control of. There`s waking up in the morning (you have the choice to get up happy or depressed), your health, your free time, how you go to bed, all the little decisions you can make that can make your day happier, etcetera. You have the reins, even if you think your horse is getting wild. You can be pessimistic and pull out the generalised "life sucks" card and leave it at that, or look at it a different, more positive way. Even that is a choice in itself!
When I read these sentences above, I asked myself, "Do I want to spend my life just thinking about how much life sucks? Do I want to keep brooding and feel bitter about the negative situations and people in my life that have done me wrong? Situations and people that have scarred me so deeply that every small misstep that someone makes (however unintentional) feels like salt getting rubbed into my open wounds? Do I really want to keep thinking like that?" And my answer was simply
No.
No, I don`t want to be bitter for the rest of my life. No, I don`t want to keep thinking about ghosts and monsters in my past and inside of me and letting them haunt my head in the middle of the night. No, I don`t want to sit here, afraid to do something new because it might end up being a negative experience. No, no, no. I want to be happy. I want to stop letting things in the past get to me now. I want to move forward and stop worrying. I want to stop thinking about the meaning of life and what I am doing in this world, and why I am put here, and how long will it take before I stop existing. I want to stop all those things and actually start existing. To live my life as if it`s one of the last days. I want to love others fiercely and treat them like I want to be treated. I want to start thinking about where I want to go, what sights I want to see, what adventures (or trouble) I can get into and find creative ways to get out of it. I want to exist.
Of course, this whole thing will take time. I know that you can`t change the way you think about something as abstract as life overnight and I know I will need some strong convincing in order to change the way I see life, but I am not going to be passive about it. I just have to remember that I am not totally helpless and I have a choice whether to let something or someone affect me or not. It`s going to take a lot of work, but, as they always say, realising the 'problem' is the first step of getting better.
Life isn`t totally miserable. Don`t spend the rest of your life thinking about it.
Mia L.
