Days Can Be Hard
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
-Stephen Hawking
Some days are hard.
It’s hard to remain optimistic when things don’t go your way. It’s hard to keep doing what you know you need to do when your “know” is wavers by a lack of results. It’s hard to smile when people constantly take advantage of you and when you lose faith in people.
It’s hard to remain generous when you feel taken advantage of. It’s hard to stay happy when it seems like everyone and everything is trying to make happiness impossible.
Life can be freaking hard at times. But such is life.
For life to be hard, it also has to be good. They are both tied to each other.
Did you know that happiness research suggests that an individual’s level of happiness is based on the difference between what an individual wants and what they have? Satisfaction is just comparing what you think will make you happy and how far that is from your current situation.
Interesting.
Much of life is a comparison. To decide anything, we use something else as a reference for comparison. Then, based on this other thing, we can form our opinion based on the similarities and differences between the two.
Think about social media for a moment. Did you know that depression meds are at their highest prescribed numbers ever? What does that have to do with social media? It has everything to do with it.
We use social media outlets to compare our lives to everyone else’s. And because social media is a curated, filtered, and almost always wholly inaccurate portrayal of other people’s lives, we are upset that our life doesn’t match up.
Like I said, comparison.
There are a lot of things in life that make it hard for us to be happy. Expectations of friends and family and our peers, the “glamorous” lives we see others live, the amount of distraction via the internet and the on-demand nature of everything, the lack of nature and natural food in our society, the toxins and pollution we are exposed to daily, and much more.
Human beings are not meant to live the way we now live. Our genes have not had the time necessary to adapt to a world that has changed so much in the last hundred years. And our health and happiness suffer as a result.
To address each of these points, and provide recommendations for each, is beyond the scope of this post. That said, I will leave you with one parting word of advice:
Slow down and get outside.
I guess that’s two. Oh well, get to it either way.
