Most people believe it all their lives. We think people are being figurative when they tell us that reality happens in our imagination. But we’re not, and until we face that absolute fact (that ties us all together), we will suffer because we will spend all of our time trying to satisfy a bunch of other people’s opinions when that’s impossible because they all see us in their own way.
Instead, our belief is that our reality is formed by society, and the events and practices of our lives. This means we can’t be happy at work because it’s called work and we reserve our happiness for the word play, or leisure, or vacation.
We can even be like that to the point where we can even dislike other people for the fact that they love their job. Or maybe it’s not our work; maybe we believe we can only be happy if we’re with one particular person because the definition of we have of ourselves is as half of a partnership. This of course means that any time we are single we deem ourselves as having failed.
Often, we’ll subconsciously let our society tell us what’s good and what’s bad and we live up to it without question. A lot of the time that makes society work better. But sometimes it makes individuals unhealthy.
For the vast majority of us, any unknown food is also an unwanted one. Pregnancy has to be an awful, painful experience you need drugs for. Or if someone in your family is afraid of heights they can teach you to be too. But does it really seem likely that heights themselves are dangerous? Of course not, people stand at the edge of substantial heights all the time.
Could we find people who like unpopular things? Could we find people who love their job? Can we find women who valued pregnancy and went through it without drugs? Due to simply no other choice, that would be more than half the women on Earth, so we can definitely find them. And as noted, there’s no shortage of people walking in places featuring extremely high heights.
Maybe we believe these people are working with more than we are. Maybe we really just aren’t that good. Maybe they are, maybe not. But more importantly, it’s unfortunate that that terrible idea of ourselves is all too believable to many of us.
Our life is not our actions, it is an emotional experience. We list it as things that made us happy and things that made us sad, when really it’s things we allowed ourselves to think gratefully about, versus things that we wished were different. We don’t really need to gain the difference between our ideals and ourselves, we need to lose the desire to do so.
We all perform so much of our lives to please others it’s ridiculous. Every life has challenges and it is experience that helps us each find where our line is between things we should accept versus things we should put our energy into changing. But it should be us deciding that.
If we want to change ourselves every time someone else wants us to act this or that way then we’re not even living our own lives, we’re just reading off of a bunch of other people’s unique scripts.
We are better to be ourselves. The people who will respond most positively to it are our people and we don’t need anything to earn their love and support other than to be the people we already are at that time.
That simple focus is much more relaxing than second-guessing ourselves into insanity. If we don’t do that, it leaves us tons of extra energy that we can use to become even better versions of ourselves.
We need to stop wanting life to be different. We need to appreciate how it is. Because the appreciation happens inside our head, meaning the act of appreciation is always within our control. And if you’ve got that, you’ve got happiness no matter where we are.
peace. s
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
infallible. But to realize that you’ve been given a job because it needs doing. And your job is to do it the best you can, which I did.
Don’t let fears of being liked prevent you from doing what you think is right. You absolutely will be wrong quite often, just like all of us. But as long as you’re right more than you’re wrong, they let you keep playing the big sandbox.
partnered, the young from the more mature etc. etc. Each comes with their own unique challenges. But what’s important from your perspective is not to always and exclusively think about how the company will benefit—you’ve already done that, that’s why you’re asking the employee whatever you’re asking them for. You should also be thinking about how it impacts the employee’s specific 
waking existence and it’s reasonable that they would want to feel like they were 
got their chance to celebrate their successes—even if that was pure survival—and now they’re being asked for 
wouldn’t be a bad idea to make them all hot dogs in a funny hat. Because the less you feel like a boss and more you feel like a trusted and respected friend, the better.
All you have to do is engage her in those one or two subjects where she can find joy. Talk about those with her. Build a positivity bond between you and her so that when she sees your face she associates it with happiness. Because there will be chemical bleed. If she’s just been super happy because she was having a discussion about Arabian stallions, then if a co-worker walks up and asks her something, rather than her being in her usual negative state of mind she’ll be in a positive one and so her first response is far more likely to be warmer. That’s how we all work.
