How To Live A Great Life

A lot of people really struggle with finding peace in their lives. They spend so much time looking for misery out of life’s experiences. Someone didn’t reply to my message, he/she rejected me, I didn’t choose to live like this, it’s my parents’ fault, it’s my teacher’s fault, we’re always blaming others or the world for what happens to us.

But how is any of this inherently a problem for us. If we desire to reach out to the people around us and the people don’t respond, since when did that mean something about us? Since when did we start believing that we were the reason that life treats us the way it does. Doesn’t that sound really egoistic?

Yet when you start looking around, you’ll notice that a lot of the suffering in life stems out of people taking responsibility for something that isn’t their problem. Our parents have a problem and we as children feel like we’re responsible or at least feel guilty for not meeting their expectations. If we fail in school, we feel like there’s something wrong with us, everywhere we go, we’re met with a meaning for who we are shoved in our faces and told it’s important, but is it really all that important?

Grades are just information about the results of a test, our parents expectations are just information about other people in our life and their desires, the actions or inaction of people around us never has to thread a meaning for itself, sometimes the world is just as it is and we’re the ones trying to understand it so badly that we create reasons for the way things are.

When we wanted to understand the world, Newton created Newtonian physics based on the perceived effects on Earth. When Einstein started considering physics at the speed of light, he realized Newtonian physics was all wrong and created his own model to explain things. Today we still teach Newtonian physics in schools because, as most scientists will point out to you, “it works” but the point is that just because it works doesn’t mean its the truth.

This is the first step to living a good life. What are we? How do we function? We claim to suffer and strive for success in the world, yet do any of us really know anything about who we are as individuals? Do any of us really know how we’re supposed to function and what’s appropriate for us?

Depending on how many layers deep you’d like to go, you can live a life using principles at the level of Newton’s theories or Einstein’s theories but at the end of the day all of us really just need to live a life that works for us.

“Understanding” is really just a toy we get to amuse ourselves with along the way.

But we’re all unique, even if we try to understand the world all we’ll be met with is the reality that you can never truly understand it. Human beings aren’t supposed to totally understand it.

The reason this is important is to recognize that whether we can or can not understand the true nature of the world, our minds will try nevertheless. It is our duty to not get caught up in any of it.

Some of us are born with strong curious minds that want to understand the true nature of the world, that will try with all of it’s might. But just because we can do something doesn’t mean it doesn’t have limits.

Being strong can be a downside if used to harm instead of protect.

This is why learning about ourselves and how to make our lives work is absolutely crucial. The first half of our lives is really about understanding ourselves and how to be true to ourselves. This isn’t about understanding everything, it’s about understanding enough so that we can control who we are. So that things like our strong minds or sensitivities to other people are used in a positive manner, as a strength, instead of something that is misunderstood and used inappropriately in order to harm and create misery in our lives.

This brings us back to the first point: a lot of people struggle with finding peace in their lives. A lot of people look for misery instead. Learn how to control yourself, learn about who you are. Reach the point that things don’t sway you anymore, not because they’re not important but because you see them for what they are: information about the world.

Then choose what you desire from life’s experiences: satisfaction or frustration, a peaceful life or a life born out of sin.