If You Feel Miserable, It’s Time To Zoom Out
If you don’t voluntarily, life will force it upon you in its choosing
I know you’re miserable.
You’ve been trying to figure out your life for quite some time now.
The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t been good for a lot of people. My long-term relationship with my fiance was failing. My job was terrible and I was looking for an exit to that circus.
In 2019 I got involved with the wrong people running a pyramid scheme (Amway) in my area.
Everything that we think will make us happy didn’t work for me. Relationships, work, money, “business” — I still felt terrible on the inside.
Not only will the pursuit of happiness not bring happiness, but the side effects are often much worse.
In 2021 I thought I was too old to change careers. At this point, I had learned my lesson and abandoned the pyramid scheme, Amway, but my life still felt messed up.
Investing in a new skill set was now my new “solution”. Yet that consumed most of my time outside of work.
The relationship with the one person I cared about now faced more neglect in my pursuit of greed and validation.
This new skill set, and hope for a new career never yielded the results I wanted, because now I was facing a breakup with her.
When life seems too miserable or serious do this:
Take a step back.
Look at your life from a third-person perspective.
Pretend you’re playing a video game or watching a movie.
Movies, TV, literature, and video games, offer you an opportunity to experience a story of someone’s life without the stress of actually living it.
It’s far easier to see their flaws than the character can. The character is stuck experiencing the narrative while you can see everything else going on.
We’re too serious about our lives.
That’s why we can easily point out the mistakes in others, but we can’t see them in ourselves.
We don’t see how ridiculous, irrelevant, and ultimately meaningless our circumstances are compared to everything in the universe. We are too myopic.
You must see that even though you are miserable, it’s (mostly) all by your creation.
For example, I allowed too many things to go on in my relationship. I let her do whatever she wanted. I let myself become bogged down in distractions rather than occasionally stepping back and auditing the situation from a zoomed-out perspective.
No wonder I felt terrible. I was too serious all of the time. A fresh perspective would have been enlightening.
It’s time to stop doubling down on everything.
Take a moment — pretend that you are someone else viewing your circumstances.
See your life as someone who doesn’t have any real stake in how it turns out. You might see the flaws, absurdities, and opportunities in this.
If you couldn’t recommend your current circumstances to someone, why would you continue living that way? Why keep trying to dig deeper instead of pulling out for a moment?
We don’t zoom out because we’re afraid
For the last 3 or 4 years I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of lifestyle suits me, and I’m still not sure.
We’re afraid to be introspective and seek the real answer because it may not line up with what society expects. Society expects that you have a high-paying job, a beautiful spouse, and 2 children.
It’s seriously frightening if that doesn’t match up with what you want.
Rather than focus on what I wanted, I kept trying different things.
It’s incredibly difficult to admit to ourselves that years of our lives might be spent running down the wrong path. So we think why not just continue on this way, I’m already on it.
I know life can be miserable, but from a zoomed-out perspective, it’s not as bad. It’s certainly not pleasant to realize that your circumstances are a joke, but life becomes less serious this way.
When we’re afraid, sad, angry, etc…
We try to cover up the pain with sex, porn, alcohol, shopping, food, and everything else.
Why not stop for a moment? Take a step back. Observe yourself in the moment and be non-judgmental, but honest with yourself.
Yet, it’s easy to practice this with past circumstances, but not the present moment. It’s why we can say Oh what was I doing with that person, she was a terrible partner. I can’t believe I stayed with her.
That’s you as a different person observing the past of who you once were.
But when you’re narrowed in on one thing that is bad about your life you can’t see the full picture.
Zooming out gives you a chance to be in the present moment. You’re no longer thinking about the past or the future, but just observing.
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