The challenge of thinking long-term

[Manuel]

All my life I have been way too impatient and over-ambitious! For 15 years I tried to improve my life and failed miserably because I sunk back into depression and self-pity every single time.
I am taking one last stab at trying to fix my life because I’ve been so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ depressed and feeling hopeless and suicidal that I can’t take it anymore.

I realized something the other day, something that I was actually already aware of but I was never ready to really face the truth of it. Which is that whenever I tried to improve my life I became terribly over-ambitious and wanted to change too MUCH too SOON. I wanted to be this kind of Superman who would be able to fix all his problems if he just found the right METHOD. But I have been trying this for years and it's gotten me nowhere. It is obviously not working, and as I’ve always been so fond of saying “insanity is like doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result”. (Which makes me pretty insane by my own definition! Lol).


In any case, I recently reread a book I have had a long time, called “The life you were born to live” by Dan Millman. It’s about a thing called numerology (kind of like astrology, a personality type system). But I think it’s actually much better than astrology, because in this book he doesn’t just describe what your personality is like (based on your birth date, you have to do calculations with it to arrive at a certain combination of numbers which signify your “type”), but it also talks about the unique life challenges of people of your type. The things that you personally struggle with and need to overcome and the first time I read it I have to admit I DID agree with all of it, but I just wasn’t ready to face the truth of what it meant for me. I guess what I’m trying to say is that now, after so many years of futile attempts to improve my life, I have become so sick of the pain I have created for myself, my mind has opened up a bit more to the ideas in that book and right now it seems like it’s the only thing I can think of to try.

I always used to think I was too weak to change my life, like I had no willpower, zero discipline, too much self-pity, all of that ♥♥♥♥. I now think that perhaps I just tried to do too much at once, for fear that it might take much too long to fix all the things I need to fix to get a nice life! In any case, here’s my plan: I have decided that I need to get a grip on my impatience and my over-ambition, trying to change everything overnight. So starting this week I have decided to add ONE small thing every week from now on that will improve my life somewhat. For example, this first week I have decided to add “physical relaxation daily” as a habit that I will keep from this week forward. Every day I will take a few moments to completely relax my entire body, every muscle etc. Even on days when I don’t feel like doing it because I”m depressed or have too much to do or whatever. And I’m only doing that one thing this week, I’m not adding any other things to improve (which in the past I WOULD do whenever I got excited, I would try to suddenly change EVERYTHING in my life).

Then the next week I will add another small thing that will improve my life a little bit, like for example practicing guitar daily for just 15 minutes. Then once I can do this for a whole week, the next week I might increase that to practicing guitar for 30 minutes daily or whatever I can manage to do without driving myself crazy.

Every week I will add one small thing that improves my life, from working on my career, to healthier eating habits, spending less money, getting up earlier etc. etc.

I figured that if I can consistently add one little positive thing every week that in one year’s time I will have added 52 positive habits to my life, which should make a big change! I think I might be able to handle adding one small thing a week. Believe it or not, but the hardest thing for me with this whole project is going to be to NOT add things to it, since I am so impatient to get everything better!

I'm not sure why i'm posting this, if you are reading this and you have had similar problems as mine, maybe you can try it out too and see what you think? I've just started this week so I can't say how it will all turn out.

IN any case, I do highly recommend the book by Dan Millman, it is absolutely fascinating! Like I said, it doesn't just talk about your personality type but about the specific major life challenges that each type faces. I found it extremely enlightening and dead-on, as far as my type is concerned! Don't expect miracles from the book though, reading it and understanding it is easy. Working with your challenges and OVERCOMING them is the HARD part! But maybe that is exactly the way Life is SUPPOSED to be (as the book explains). I highly recommend it!

[Brutha]

The challenge isn't to think long term. It's to enjoy the moment and the process of changing.

[Manuel]

Originally Posted by Brutha

The challenge isn't to think long term. It's to enjoy the moment and the process of changing.

Hmmm, well...I thought I WAS focused on enjoying the moment all my previous years, WITHOUT thinking about the longer term consequences! For example, if I would only focus on enjoying the present moment I would drink a bottle of wine and eat junk food and I'd do that every day, but over a longer period that wouldn't really produce very positive results, would it?

[Brutha]

I think people generally take alcohol because they don't want to be present and fully aware of everything that's going on.
It's a strategy of avoiding problems. It's not a strategy for being in the present moment.
Eating junk foot and getting insulin flashes is similar.

[Rimuel]

Determine your daily and weekly workload, and arrange your goals around that. I cannot study for more than 4 hours a day. I also cannot study every day for more than 4 hours a day. So I would arrange my studies in a way that allows me to sustain my effort.

As Steve puts it, the purpose of having goals is to improve your present moment. If you despise the experience you are having in the moment as a result of your goals, you should change your goals.

EDIT: Yes, life is supposed to be hard. It's like playing a game on Extremely Hard mode. But if life is so hard, it's hard to imagine that there's nothing at the end of it. Which is why I have my reservations about the logical argument that the afterlife does not exist.