There are a lot of videos out there with names like “Cure your depression in 5 minutes”, “The secret to a happy life revealed”, “Seven happiness hacks”.
And these are so good at baiting those clicks, because wow, I want to know.
[…] I mean, if it was really possible to have happiness solved in 3 steps, to cure my depression in the length of one video, you know, wouldn’t that already be done? Wouldn’t somebody already have done that? And why are we still talking about it, if it was that easy? So we can’t really believe that it could be that easy, and yet I still want to believe, enough to still investigate this idea and find out what it’s about.
Now, I think the flip side of this is that, in some ways, I believe it is possible to completely change our mindset in a moment.
It is possible.
And maybe not cure depression or find ultimate happiness, but we can change so much simply by changing our interpretation of what’s around us, our interpretation of ourselves especially, how we see ourselves, what story we imagine for our lives.
That determines so much of our state of mind.
[…] You can see this easily with the idea of comparing your life to something else.
I imagine if I were in prison for years, and then I suddenly got out, and now I have my regular, mundane day.
Well, this would somehow seem like paradise.
This would be amazing to have this day.
But of course I don’t think about that when it’s just waking up to another mundane day.
Or I could imagine that I used to have a life that was so much better, and then I wake up to this.
Even if it is a great life, if I imagine that I once had something so much better, then it’s really hard to appreciate that.And the only difference between those is the story that I tell.
It can be a story of “This is so much better than I could imagine” or “This is so much worse than I could imagine.” You could tell those different stories about the exact same situation.
And these kind of changes in stories, changes in how we see ourselves: they they can happen in a moment.
It can only take a moment for us to change the way we interpret ourselves and our situation.
So in that sense, it seems like it really is possible to make this kind of big change within a very short time.
But of course, this is something that doesn’t come out of nowhere.
Yes, we can change our life story and our life perception and interpretation in a moment, but do we? Do we actually do that? How do we actually change these patterns that are built in? And that’s where it seems to be the only way to get to that point of the instant transformation is to go through the long, long journey that’s far from instant, through all the turns, the grinding, the up and down, the dead ends, the lost wanderings, the course corrections, adjustments, and all the different steps of this very uncertain journey over a long time.
And especially just the repetitions, of whatever we do: just baking it in by repeating it.
That’s what leads to these sudden moments where it seems like in an instant our life changes.
But, all those long hours and days and years are behind that instant.
Now, can you get that instant, then, by watching a 5-minute Youtube video? Well, I can’t say it’s impossible but I haven’t seen it yet, of course.
And in fact, what I see as being the most valuable is this kind of opposite approach, maybe even going too far opposite, where I want the hard work.
I want the difficulty.
I don’t want to be told that everything can be better in a flash.
I want to be told that it’s gonna be a long hard slog.
Embracing the difficulty, embracing the length of the grind, the length, and the uncertainty, and yeah, you’re gonna work very hard, it’s gonna be painful, uncomfortable, and you have no guarantee of any successful result.
Maybe a title like that is not the best clickbait, although maybe that’s worth trying too.
But somehow that feels more honest to me, and there seems to be some kind of power in being able to accept difficulty without any promise, so that it feels like this is something real, something I can count on.
It’s not an empty promise.
It’s not just sales talk.
It’s like the opposite of sales talk.
It’s like “Here, buy this product.
It’s gonna be painful.
It’s difficult to use.
It will take you a long time to get what you want, and actually I can’t guarantee that you will ever get what you want.
Buy this product.” That is not a great sales pitch, and maybe that’s what makes it extra believable and makes it feel more real.
That’s something that I can really take hold of.
So yeah, “Cure your depression in just 50 years” and “The 100,000 difficult steps to possible happiness”.
That sounds more like it.
#lifehacks #therapy #quickfix