The Secret to Living Well Is to Enjoy Life in Its Moment
How to Enjoy Life In Every Moment Has a Simple Secret.
I love these secrets-hidden-in-plain-sight.
You always find what you’re looking for, that’s a given. The trick is to See what you’re looking At.
Because appearances aren’t (usually) actuality.
Those aren’t mystic koans. You can prove them for yourself. Review and study where you’ve been, the goals you’ve achieved. What you’ll find is that the more certainty you approached them with, the faster they showed up.
Our recent events prompted this. But that is what Life is for, apparently. To give us a clue when we aren’t on a track we want to travel.
It’s sometimes a lot of work to get your lines clear of noise and stupidity (that last being the sheer definition of people purposefully not seeing what they are looking at.)
The events of the last few days and longer have tended to cause sadness. And since that’s the opposite of joy, this lead to more research about how things were and how they could be.
This research only found: what you immerse yourself in should be bringing you more joy. If not, perhaps you want to cut some of them out.
Most people work to improve their lives. They seek to have more fun, to enjoy life, to help others as well.
What’s come up recently, is that none of the corporate “news” stations are actually designed to help you with those goals. Their goal is to provide a content channel which sells ad space and time. Study after study has shown that social media (especially Facebook) makes people sad. And hobbies tend to make them more cheerful. So we should do more of what we like and less of what we don’t like. Less social media, more involvement with activities and real people who care and are supportive.
Some time ago, I started to move to another room when the TV was turned on. It was usually on just for news, but that news was at least 95% bad news. Horrible stuff we couldn’t do anything about.
The idea was that selecting Internet sources would give you more news that was at least in alignment with what you believe. Unfortunately, all these Internet “news” channels, on the left or the right or center, all use the same pattern to get your attention:
Unresolvable Conflict.
This is different from the core of what is considered “good entertainment.” Books on plotting say that the core of any popular novel is a conflict. Even if it’s only inside the hero (but usually has an external villain.) In entertainment, the conflict gets resolved. In the “news” the conflict resolution is usually unreported if it happens at all. (News stories “have legs” only where there is continuing conflict.)
Our newspapers, going right back to the days of Hearst’s “yellow journalism” have all used pumped-up (“fake”) conflict to get people’s attention. Pumped up conflict. Sure, there are man-made and natural disasters. The differences between Houston, Florida, and Puerto Rico is the amount of pumped-up and unresolvable conflict about the disasters. Houston and Florida were reported pretty simply, with reporters themselves rescuing people and pets from the floods. Lots of stories about humble heroes. Puerto Rico was miles away across oceans, and the “nasty filters” seemed to lock on. A hyper-critical mayor running for governor got more attention than the hospitals getting their electricity back.
Then we had the shooting. The “nasty filters” showed up within 24 hours. Politics was entered into all sorts of things. People calling for new laws instead of helping people recover from the shock, or upset.
None of these disasters had solutions that were simple fixes. Most of it could be overwhelming if you kept watching it.
There were very few places telling you at least where to donate. Hero stories were few, and showed up days later, little reported. People lining up to give blood the next day at 4:30am, and having to settle for appointments days later, a huge response on GoFundMe pages to help the victims — that hardly got reported.
That’s just sad.
The best advice now is to stay away from stuff that makes you sad and go look for stuff that brings you joy. Stuff that helps you enjoy life.
Fiction with conflict in it seems to be enjoyable when they resolve the problems by the end of the story.
Ever notice that all the original Star Trek shows ended with the good guys winning? Pick up some Louis LaMour or Max Brand Westerns. Or the old Doc Savage or other pulp fiction stories. Good guys always win. Everything gets resolved.
What social media, “news”, and politics bring you is endless conflict. Nobody wins. Nothing can really be done about what they are talking about. More laws means less rights, less choice.
There are solutions you can take to enjoy life more.
Social media makes you sad, “news” makes you sad, politics makes you sad. Stay off those.
Get your entertainment direct and avoid the irritation of ads.
Watch current or classic movies from their DVD’s or subscription. Or read great books. Plenty of those around.
And find sites where they don’t throw stuff at you all the time. Subscribe to sites that give you great content you can really use (not like cable and satellite where you pay for junk channels.) Get rid of ads that way. Same for your smartphone. Invest some time to get rid of the junk apps you don’t use (even if they came with the phone, you can freeze them.) Spend a little to get the paid versions and get rid of the sad ads.
Live more simply. Donate anything you don’t regularly use, or won’t need in the foreseeable future, to places where they can find people who may need them. Find places you can regularly donate any excess income you might have.
Live simpler.
Fill your life with Joy.
Enjoy Life more.
- — — -
Choose more hope and possibilities, less endless conflict.
Two of the biggest civilizing factors in our long history have been Christianity and Buddhism. Both of these preferred non-violent means of getting goals accomplished. (Historians will find conflict with that idea, but that is how they sell their books.) The ideas of open-handed love and respect have done more for enabling people to live together in peace than any other. And still, despite the “news”, we actually have more peace than war breaking on this planet. In the U.S. there has been increasing violence in only a handful of major cities. Nearly everywhere else, the overall crime rate has continued to decrease.
Today, it came out that more people are killed by guns as suicide every year than as homicides. Sure, it’s been “illegal” to commit suicide since before we were born. That did a lot of good.
And there were some massive donations for these disasters, but the news is filled with unresolvable conflict instead. Where are the stories about the progress in rebuilding? Pets reunited with owners or found new homes if they were strays?
You have to wonder if our “news” reporting is covering these up because there isn’t enough conflict. You will see that the corporate news channels are losing viewers like a sieve. The last report I saw showed that one corporate channel took over the lead simply because it lost less viewers than the others. Still sad.
People have choice and vote on what they want to watch. More unsolvable conflict, less viewers. The NFL is finding this out. ESPN may not be listening too well to their (decreasing) viewers. The “news” networks certainly aren’t.
People want to be entertained with great experiences. They want to have excitement, possibilities, hope. They like their conflict served on the resolved side.
If you keep making people sad, they’ll eventually leave. (Facebook, Twitter, this means you.)
— — —
The world seems to change all the time, because its more facade than real.
Your certainty about yourself and your goals will change the world around you so you can achieve those goals.
Where you’ve succeeded, you’ve been absolutely certain of your goal. The rest of the world then fell into place so you could achieve it. Go ahead, look over what you’ve accomplished so far.
This is the secret to each of the books in the Strangest Secret Library. Like Dorothea Brande’s “Wake Up and Live.” After she changed her own concept of herself, to “Act as if its impossible to fail.” Then she 5 or 10x’d her production of published works and was much happier and more satisfied with her life. She’s known today for her two bestselling books which were produced right after she found that datum and started applying it.
The world didn’t change to make her success, she changed her world and then the “reality” around her became her own actuality. She found what she was looking for, by changing her mind.
The one route I preach is to study that library from beginning to end, then start over. Do this as many times as necessary to get the results you want. Because these books build certainty around that one core idea, “We become what we think about.”
As you refine your thoughts, you hone your own certainty to a fine edge.
Your certainty creates the world you want to find.
Be more certain about your goals in life. Chase those that bring you more joy, that help you enjoy life more.
Best of wishes in your adventure.
Originally published at Living Sensical.