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In Your Pursuit of Happiness, Don’t Forget About Today
It might be what matters most
Do you fantasize about how much better the future will be?
Maybe you think things will be better when all your exams are finished. When you’ve graduated from university. When you’ve landed your first real job. When you’ve received that promotion. When you’ve bought that swanky home. When you’ve found “the one.”
Many of us endure what we perceive as the less-than-ideal present because of the promise that some future moment will be so much better.
As a result, we push happiness into the future by wanting more, being dissatisfied, and not feeling good enough. We think that at some unknown moment in the future, our lives will be set up exactly how we want them to be and then we can finally relax and be happy.
The trouble is, we are bad at predicting what will make us happy. The things we often imagine will make us happy, don’t.
Do you see our predicament? We sacrifice today’s happiness in the hopes of gaining more happiness tomorrow, yet what we’re working so hard to achieve probably won’t make us happy!
This sounds like a bad strategy for happiness, but do we really make these errors? And, if we do, is there anything we can do about it?
