In a couple hours, I will change my working location from the home lounge room to a bit of a different office, a hospital bed. I am due for my IV treatment again and will spend a couple hours sitting there with the drip in my arm trying to not think too much of what is going to follow, a week or so of feeling even more crappy than normal. Health is wealth - illness is even worse when poor. As I have said since I was a kid,

"Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a much nicer sadness".

These are the ups and downs of life

We all have challenges and while we might like to compare how hard we and how easy others have it, the situation is that we each deal with the life we have the best we can, with a very wide degree of approaches, skills and therefore, outcomes. Sometime the issues that seem so important at the time become irrelevant a short while later, sometimes the things that were barely a blip on our radar become the most influential and turn our lives upside down - or perhaps if lucky, turns us right-side up.

One of the stories that has stuck with me since I was a teen was from a friend of my mother's - but he didn't tell me himself. He went on a month-long cruise to the Antarctic, supposedly one of the most beautiful places on earth due to its starkness, isolation and exotic nature due to unfamiliarity to what we normally know. He didn't expect to come back from the beauty - it was here he chose to end his life. Instead, he found the love of his life, a woman that he never expected to meet.

Life expected

Expectations are funny things, as when we expect we assume that we are right, we commit to an outcome, even though life has likely proven how often and completely wrong we have been in the past. When things are bad - we expect them to get better, when things are good - we expect them to last, when we are healthy - we expect to stay that way. We expect that things are going to work toward our favor and what I have found it that even the pessimistic do this, as while they voice their negativity often, they leak their expectation that things will improve.

Maybe we as humans aren't designed to be very good pessimists, where we are negative in words but our actions tend to lean toward improvement. If you consider how terrible life can be for some people, it is incredible that the rate of self-extinguishing isn't significantly higher.

Life abandoned

I was talking to a friend the other day about why some people might commit suicide and it seems to be much more a function of the relatively well-off elements of the population. I suggested that it might be partly that when times are hard, the feelings of sadness and depression are acceptable, there is a reason for them. However, when times are relatively good - the feelings seem obviously out of place with the conditions.

Then there are the expectations that come into play, the feeling that like my mother's friend, affect our thoughts and behaviors - the expectation that things can't improve - even though at the most opportune of moments, life throws a curve ball and does improve beyond where we ever expected it to go. Maybe this is what we also hold onto, the lottery effect where we feel that despite how bad our life might be, luck has to happen to someone, it might as well be me. Someone has to win after all.

Life reviewed

When I look at my own life, the only one that I can relate directly to, I have had a fair distribution of the ups and downs, but I wonder what the average would be, the negative or the positive? I also wonder if this historical view matters at all, as it could be that we are what we are in the very moment and if I am okay right now, what does it matter how I was a moment ago - or how I will be in a moment's time. However, taking this view would mean to be affected by the moment without consideration of what is to come, be highly reactive no matter what damage that may cause the future me, or those around me - the life of the internet persona, continually pushed and pulled from whatever comes into awareness. But also, from whatever influences, but doesn't come into awareness.

This is a challenge, because while we are of course going to give precedence to what we know, there is a great deal that influences our lives that lay beyond what we know, small changes in the environment that we can miss - sometimes, very large changes too. We definitely suffer from an availability bias and we often over-weigh what is happening and how we feel about it right now, without being able to cross-reference it with all of the things we aren't considering in the moment, including what hasn't passed our consciousness - Is the bad mood because of current events, or that I haven't eaten a good meal in 12 hours?

Life reimagined

The good, the bad and the ugly - no matter who we are in this world, we are going to experience a range of the best and worst of it, regardless of what that will mean in comparison to others. Each life has highlights and low-lights, but at the end of the day - the majority of life is lived in the average where not much of much is happening and we might get bored. So, we try to force a highlight of some kind, engineer an outcome that takes us away from the average for a moment, a day or a week - we look to escape from our life and often, escape from ourselves.

As I was speaking with my friend the other day, happiness is a transitory state that moves from moment to moment and sometimes, it feels like it is gone and won't return. I find it strange that so many seek happiness when what they might really be looking for is contentment. However, we tend to favor the peaks and troughs of life, rather than look at the average we live, we tend to remember and look forward to points that impacted the most, while what actually drives our daily lives gets forgotten, ignored, lived via default.

When we ignore the majority of the life we lead, what do we expect from life itself?

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]