How many times in your life have you thought:“This one goal I have right now is so important,

How many times in your life have you thought:“This one goal I have right now is so important, if I just achieve this one goal, my life will finally be complete and I’ll be happy and grateful every day.”Then you did achieve it.What happened?You returned to your regularly scheduled happiness baseline. You filled the empty space with another goal. And another one, and another one. A few weeks later, it’s as if nothing has changed.There’s a pattern going on. Collectively, we are mostly using the chase for slightly improved outer circumstances as a crutch to hide from our inner fears and insecurities. We’re not sure about what we’re doing, so we seek comfort in hearing others tell us that they approve of our set of life choices.We’re on a treadmill, grasping at a sign that says:“When I achieve (fill in the blank), people will finally realize how awesome I am and really accept me for who I really am.”We live in this paradigm where so many of us think everyone else has it all together, that we’re the only one that’s weird, that we suck, and that we’re a disappointment in life to everyone around us because (fill in the blank).While doing this, we also don’t realize how many other people admire us and wish they could have some other (fill in the blank) that we have. No one is perfect.Every single one of us is highly flawed, and a lot more unsure of ourselves than we let on. Some people are just better actors; more skilled at covering it up.As I write every single sentence here, I ask myself about which ways they could be disproven or misinterpreted — to try my best not to give information that leads someone further away from the truth, and thus deeper into suffering. As Napoleon Hill once said, it is precisely our disadvantages that give us our greatest strengths — if we’re willing to look deeply enough and find them.The idea of winning in life, when you break it down, is really nothing more than a temporary, self-created illusion: we set a goal, we either achieve it or don’t achieve it, and then we largely just forget it ever existed and move on. It’s strange how we’ve conditioned ourselves to tie so much of our self-worth to it. What does it really mean to win? No two people have the exact same vision for their lives.Obsessing so much about winning means we likely care a bit too much about having others see that we’re capable of getting the high score in a game someone else created. This behavior is not driven from our highest self. It means we likely aren’t receiving enough self-love, and so instead we try to fill the void from outside.Any external feat you accomplish will undoubtedly be dwarfed by many others in time and forgotten. Everything we do will be forgotten. In the end, we all lose to father time. This is why spending the majority of our lives trying to do things that aren’t true to ourselves to appease the crowd or prove someone else wrong is likely a waste of time.Sustained happiness is an internal thing. No amount of likes or standing ovations is correlated with how we feel about ourselves inside on a moment to moment basis over the long term. Happiness is much more about our perspective on ourselves — and on life itself.Generating self-love is a very big part of this equation. The two main roadblocks to this are: Past conditioning (traumas) and living out of alignment with your highest values.If you’ve made a habit of neglecting yourself because you never felt worthy of self-love, jam packing your life with more external achievement based goals and bucket list items is never going to fix this. It’s only by consciously digging to the core, facing and welcoming in the uncomfortable, identifying and short circuiting old patterns, and making a practice of doing things differently that your quality of life significantly improves and the fear fades away.It’s similar to a physical training program. It’s not about doing some action a few times and going home. It’s about making the conscious decision that this new activity is now an essential pillar to your way of life from this point forward.The other part is about values. Often times, in the egoic pursuit of “winning” and “proving the haters wrong” we may end up abandoning the values and ways of being that actually made us proud, happy, joyful and enthusiastic to be who we are — in the pursuit of the arbitrary next goal. That’s why this commonplace “keeping up with the Joneses” paradigm is so toxic. With the levels of stress, depression and unhealthiness omnipresent in our current society, keeping up with these imaginary Joneses is literally killing us.When we can’t see our ego as a separate entity from who we really are underneath, when we treat external approval like our oxygen and allow it to drive everything we do, we forget that our wants are different than our needs. The wants grow into a towering monster, like a young inner child who refuses to be at ease no matter how many times they are repeatedly given all of the things that they say they want on command.As Eckhart Tolle has said, the ego’s wants become a never-ending, all consuming terror that drives us into the ground, with a promise of eternal fulfillment right around the corner — if we’ll just give it a little bit more. But this form of happiness never comes for very long, it comes in extremely brief, fleeting glimpses at the very best, or sometimes not at all. Wants should never be prioritized over needs, and yet this is exactly what the ego wants us to do. When we’re not conscious of this, this is exactly how we choose to live our lives on a week to week basis — until we spiral into a blur and lose all clarity.This is where the tricky part comes in. It’s easy to wonder: Wait, but if I wasn’t driven by fear, or past trauma, or external validation, or ego, wouldn’t I just end up losing my drive and becoming a lazy person who never does anything of value?But that’s not what it’s about. Maybe if you’ve been working yourself into the ground for a long time chasing those ever elusive Joneses, sitting around doing nothing for a little while to unwind sounds appetizing. That’s not what will happen forever though; because eventually, if you do the work on yourself, that will likely become mind-numbingly boring and you’ll be driven to create something different. There’s a reason why solitary confinement is widely considered amongst the worst of all punishments in prison.In my experience, I have never met a human being who has gone through the tough work of looking internally, facing their fears and insecurities, discovering their highest values, and then decided that sitting around all day was the best use of their time to gain ultimate fulfillment. We effortlessly create thoughts, ideas, experiences, connections, sounds, patterns, languages, we even create other living beings. We are creators by nature.When coming from a place of love, when our barriers are down, it will inevitably overflow. We can’t help but do things that create more of that in the world.Herein lies the paradox of life: It can be beneficial to have goals to aim for, but we need to remember that they’re mostly just guidelines to set us in the right direction, and whether or not they are achieved shouldn’t be confused with living in the state of fulfillment itself. That goal was just a small guidepost on the road of your life, it wasn’t your life itself and all of its value. Even if it doesn’t work out, some other new opportunity will appear in life that will be just as good, or better. As Helen Keller once said, when one door closes in life, another opens, but we spend so much time focused on the closed door that we can miss it.When we come from that place of self-love and wholeness, that’s when we are able to choose the path that makes life and the goals we pursue fulfilling. The goals themselves actually are just secondary placeholders; and once you find that path they stop mattering nearly as much. You don’t look to find yourself in them, and you know that some will inevitably work out and some won’t, so they can be approached with a certain level of joyful lightheartedness that wasn’t there before.It’s like playing a video game or a board game. It can be fun in a lighthearted way to play and beat the game, but if a bad performance in the game actually makes us become angry or depressed in real life, we’re essentially wasting our time and doing it wrong. Goals work the same way. It can be fun to pursue them, but when they take over our life in a stressful way in which we constantly feel miserable, inadequate and not whole, we’re probably doing it wrong.Everything I write here is mostly stream of consciousness thoughts to better understand my own psyche and the nature of life itself. It’s just a reminder I can come back to at times when I might forget, so that those occurrences become less and less frequent. I post it here in case it’s of value to anyone else out there thinking about similar things, or to be able to spark a chain to learn from those who have alternative perspectives on these types of things — so if you do then definitely do share. Thanks for reading.To receive all of my newest writings via inbox, go here. -- source link

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