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You believe that creating your best life is a matter of deciding what you want and then going after it, but in reality, you are psychologically incapable of being to predict what will make you happy.
- You brain can only perceive what it’s known, so when you choose what you want for the future you’re actually just reating a solution or an ideal of the past. When things don’t work out the way you want them to, you think you’ve failed only because you didn’t recreate something you perceived as desirable. In reality, you likely created something better, but foreign, and your brain misinterpreted it as “bad” because of that.
- Moral of the story is that living in the moment isn’t a lofty ideal reserved for the Zen and enlightened; it’s the only way to live a life that isn’t infiltrated with illusions. It’s the only thing your brain can actually comprehend.)
You extrapolate the present moment because you believe that success is somewhere you “arrive”, so you are constantly trying to take a snapshot of your life and see if you can be happy yet.
- You convince yourself that any given moment is representative of your life as a whole. Because we’re wired to believe that success is somewhere we get to - when goals are accomplished and things are completed - we’re constantly measuring our present moments by how “finished” they are, how good the story sounds, how someone else would judge the elevator speech. We find ourselves thinking: “Is this all there is?” because we forget that everything is transitory, and no one single instance can summarize the whole. There is no where to “arrive” to. The only thing you’re rushing towards is death. Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand in the process is.