Hard Reality of Life: There Will Always Be Problems

Not sure why I thought this. But I always thought there would be a point in my life that things got easier. That there would not be any major problems. Boy was I wrong. I think many of us have these thoughts growing up and it is shocking, yet comforting at the same time. 

There was this great passage written by Sam Harris I found on Twitter (Thank you Brett Berson) that I found reassuring. And I hope you will find it helpful. 

"Were you really expecting to have no more problems at some point in your life? You're just going to wake up one morning and none of this would be happening? There would be nothing on your to-do list. Do you actually want nothing on your to-do list? Life is mostly about solving problems, and you can solve these." 

So my problem, more than anything else, was that I was treating problems themselves as anomalies. I was tacitly assuming that I should be able to get rid of all my problems and avoid any new ones. Even though this sounds ridiculous, that was implicit to me thinking and to my emotional life, to the way I was meeting each new problem. 

But of course, I can never get to a place where problems stop appearing, and neither can you. Life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn't make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one. The magnitude of the problem might surprise you, but the fact that new complications in your life are arising hour by hour is absolutely to be expected. 

Very soon, some machine that you are relying on to do work or to keep you comfortable is going to break. This is guaranteed to happen. You're also going to catch a cold in the not-too-distant future, and your plane will be late, or your luggage will get lost. At some point, you'll injure your knee and need to see a doctor for it. It can't be any other way. Really, it can't be any other way. 

And the expectation that it can or should be some other way is a great source of unnecessary suffering. Suffering that actually makes it harder to solve the problems we should be faced with. Ironically, this is a problem that you can solve, and you can do that by expecting more problems to arise every day of your life. It's like you're playing a video game. Did you expect that there would be some incredibly boring level of this video game without problems? This is the game we call existence. Problems continually arise, so enjoy them.”  

(Source: https://twitter.com/brettberson/status/1757887022650536264/photo/1)

So welcome problems that come your way. Embrace them. Believe you can handle them. It means you are alive and part of the human race. And hopefully living well.