Why Life is Long!

in #happiness8 years ago

There is an increasing epidemic of nihilism, people living life without a purpose, finding life short, meaningless and found themselves hopelessly trapped in less than favorable situation. For which the only apparent way out is hedonism, the relentless pursuit of pleasure at the sacrifice of everything else.

If you look very objectively at the duration of modern human life it is the longest it ever was. If you would be sentenced to ten years in prison that basically feels like an eternity, so living more than seventy years is like living for seven eternities. I don't think that the problem is the duration of life as much as it is the quality of life most of us have.

When you are eating junk food, design to give you the most amount of pleasure food could give you, this leads to a compromise, the food is horrible for your health and there is no nutrition in it, which paradoxically will make you want to eat more because despite the fact you are eating enough calories you are not receiving sufficient nutrition. You are overfed and malnourished at the same time.

This leads to a constant anxiety of missing out on certain experience which create a sense of urgency, particularly in the area of life you have the most amount of problems and deficiencies. Which is going to lead to self sabotaging behaviour, taking big risks in the hope of gaining skills and resources fast, unfortunately big risks also come with big losses which makes it impossible for you to accumulate anything.

And this lack of accumulation leads to one selfish and nihilistic attitude towards life, because the more you struggle the more loss you experience, so this maintains the feeling that you are missing out on certain experience and there is not sufficient time. This can get so bad that people don't even want to die anymore.

Creating a fake time constraint is a tool of manipulation, is it often used in sales and in the media to cause people to make bad rushed decisions. As all tools of manipulation are based on lies, the lye here is that almost a century of life is not enough time to enjoy your experience here and accomplish your goals. So you need "special" help to accomplish those things, this help usually being a form of sabotage that allow others to profit from you in an unfair way.

Running out of time is anxiety provoking, fear is a survival mechanism not a way to live your day to day life. When you survive you don't live, the first step in having a life is to deal with your fear, the good news is that most of what people are afraid of is not real, there is no real threat behind it this is why learning the truth about it will diminish it.

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This is a fantastic essay. I find the last paragraph to contain some very important ideas which are not talked about enough amongst people.

@hellpas This article is in "new" in "self-improvement" pretty much at the start of the queue...so i'm guessing this category is not so popular on steemit yet :)
however, I like what you say.

I often find myself not getting involved completely in projects/hobbies/anything as I feel time is of the essence..but then I find myself having done nothing over long periods of time. isn't that amazing?