Let’s Not Fool Ourselves. People Prefer to Be Dissatisfied.

People tend to make life difficult for themselves. How can we stop that?

photo © Andrew Branch on StockSnap

Have you noticed?

People tend to make life difficult for themselves. They just can’t help themselves.

We invite problems, dissatisfaction, and negative thinking. Otherwise, we are unhappy. Seriously. That’s how we can see it all around us.

The number of those who make up their misfortune to the best of their knowledge and belief is relatively large.

But, here is the trick: Anyone can be unhappy, but making yourself unhappy needs to be learned, a little experience with a few personal mishaps is not enough.

How to make yourself miserable

Pursuing unhappiness is a bit like the behavior of smokers. They smoke and feel bad about their health, their bad breath, the looks of the fanatic non-smokers, and the wasted money. But they tell themselves how much more relaxed they are, how great it tastes after dinner and that there are enough examples of chain smokers dying perfectly fine in their late nineties. So, what’s wrong with smoking?

Likewise, there is nothing wrong with the pursuit of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. It makes us feel better. Why else are we every day doing something against our possible happiness?

Because let’s face it, who wants to be like everyone else, following the rising massive How To Be Happy wave? Or, why would we want to focus so hard on what cannot be reached anyways — so, let’s save the effort. Besides, isn’t it cool hanging out with all the other like-minded fellows, exchanging on how miserable and difficult everything is?

And the best is that we don’t need all the outside forces like bad news, angry bosses, and shit falling from the sky, everything it takes to be unhappy is already within us.

People want to be unhappy. Why is that?

Imagine you have high expectations for yourself, others, or the world around you. Doesn’t that feel paralyzing? Some people prefer to not have any. Because they know that “happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length” (Robert Frost).