SELF

The Easiest Way to Prevent Your Future From Happening

Living your life with physical boundaries will create mental ones, too.

I’m going to a little shop around the corner every day. I know the guy who works there for 6 years. When we first met, we bonded about movies and slowly became friends. I got to know his life circle, which is limited to that shop and the house he lives in a few blocks away.

He’s 45 years old and had never been outside of the UK up until about 2 years ago. I encouraged him to travel, see the world, breathe in the culture in other countries. He cherished it. He always wanted to do it, but the family business came first. Work above everything else.

He’s had his fair share of drugs, drinking, and a lifestyle that was leading nowhere. He defined that as his youth and said that it took him many years to get past it. Now, he is just simply miserable and unhappy without a partner and free time to do what he aspires.

His life revolves around that 200 square feet shop and the 500-meter walk back to his apartment, where he lives and supports his parents. His only remedies are films and the occasional holidays he goes on.

He comes from an Indian heritage, but up until about 2 years ago, he had never visited his relatives over there. When he finally had the chance, spending a month in that beautiful country, he knew that he wants to live there for the rest of his life. However, he can’t leave his parents and the family business behind — at least, not yet.

He works 7 days a week and, with each day, he loses time to fulfill his dreams. He’s aware of what he should do to meet those goals, but the commitment to his responsibilities perpetually overwrites his intentions. As sad as it sounds, the only way he can step out this vicious cycle of unhappiness is to eliminate, one way or another, the responsibilities — or at least reduce them.

Lives like his always make me wonder, how many years we need to waste to live unhappily until we decide to pursue what makes us content. To chase our goals and prioritize ourselves above everything else. We often spend years, decades of our lives doing what we loathe, live where we don’t want to be, and pretend to care about things that we don’t. Our life’s circle rotates around the same things over and over again without any unpredictability.

And then, we fail to understand why we are getting obese, battle with constant anxiety, and feeling depressed on a regular basis. I’m not preaching about happiness. When we’re aware of what should we be doing, it’s not a secret how to reach a sustainably happier life. Instead, we blame adversity, financial instability, and claim to have unsolvable problems.

We drown ourselves into social media, engage in meaningless conversations, and self-medicate endlessly to endure emotional deficiency. We embrace our misery and marry our life traumas. We pretend to find meanings in empty values that we can hold onto so we don’t have to face the Uncomfortable Truth, which Mark Manson describes like this in his second book:

“One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose — we are nothing.” — Mark Manson in Everything is F*cked: A book about hope

I’m not exempt, either. I hold onto pain and immutability for way too long to avoid possible failures and setbacks. I could become a potentially stronger person, but I eliminate almost all possibilities to prove it to myself and avoid most chances to have an experience that could strengthen my self-belief.

We are lost dogs in filthy alleyways pissing on the walls to mark our territory around garbage containers. So we can proudly say that we belong somewhere, even if that’s just a stinky and dark alleyway behind a fast food joint that produces too much waste.

My friend wants to leave the UK and live in India, where he can find someone to marry. That’s his dream. But the thing is, as Mark Manson put it, “The only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.” This is a depressive but pretty smart way of saying, we always need dreams because those define our meaning.

We need to clear our minds, dissect and separate our dreams, to see which ones are real and which ones are illusions. Once we’ve done that, we need to pull out all the weeds that are blocking the way to get to them. We need to recreate our values and take action to live up to them.

These are not easy tasks. This is a long and often confusing process. Right now, I’m somewhere in the middle of that emotional rollercoaster, and I don’t know where it will take me, but I know this: I don’t want to live my life in a 500-meter radius where the future is uncertain and grim, and I don’t want to wait until I’m 45 because it gets harder with each passing day.

Comfort zones are invisible fences keeping us inside of a limitation of our minds. And those limitations sometimes are, arbitrarily, our own falsely fabricated obligations.

Ironically, only by destroying them, we could build something new.

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