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Peaceful living: not treating life as something to be solved
How to really live your life.
As humans, we’re always looking to move on to the next level. A better job, a new partner, a more interesting city, or a more expensive car. Regardless of what it is, there’s always something we’re yearning for or working towards.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with setting goals and taking action in life. A problem arises, though, when life becomes something that you are continually focused on improving.
Life becomes not a life, but a problem to solve.
We’re living in a highly-distracted world
It’s so easy to fall into the mind trap that tells you there’s something more to be done, even when there isn’t. We are, after all, living in highly-distracted times.
With the rise of the internet, it’s normal to be constantly on devices. Whether we’re checking social media, reading emails, scrolling the news, or tuning into Netflix, our technological world is designed to take up as much of our free time as possible.
This is free time that could be spent walking in nature, sitting in meditation, appreciating flowers, or spending quality time with loved ones.
Instead, we’re always on the lookout for what’s next. I’m quite convinced this has exaggerated our mind-made need for more.
We’re increasingly anxious
Not so many years ago, we didn’t have phones in our pockets that could connect us instantly to every person we’d ever met.
Moments of boredom, couldn’t be quickly filled by looking at our digital devices. We didn’t connect via the internet, rather than spending time in person. Scrolling was something you did on parchment and I doubt it was addictive — even if it did evoke ASMR.
It appears we were better without constant distraction.
Anxiety, depression, and stress appear to have all increased due to smartphone use. Those same phones have also exaggerated social comparison making us less satisfied with our lot.
Gone are the days when our only social comparisons were people we knew.
