"Episode 4: The Life We Are All Waiting For Isn't Coming..."

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And trust me when I say I know what it's like to make your own life difficult. Does your life feel like Groundhog Day on repeat? Welcome to the Eye of the Hurricane Podcast. You know, I think a lot of us are waiting for a life that isn't coming. And that sounds terrible. And I realize that. And it's probably not the strongest opening if we're trying to build an audience. But I don't mean that we're not already having great lives. I mean something completely different. And I think a lot of us have spent most of our lives believing there's a better version of life that comes later. And I think it's that very thought for myself that has led to unhappiness. And I think it does for a lot of other people. And it also comes along with feeling stuck. So don't get me wrong, this isn't about not striving or, you know, wanting great things for ourselves and the ones that we love. It's really about that non-fillable bucket of more, right? If we're similar, think about how long we've been doing this. You know, when we're young, it makes perfect sense. You know, we're building towards everything. But think about where happiness we think comes from. We say we'll be happier when we graduate. We're going to be happy when we make more money. You know, when we get married, when we buy the house. You know, I'm going to be happy when the kids get a little bit older, you know, when I get that promotion. And every time we get there, there's another win. And then again, more. Just the last thing we've been missing to be happy, right? At some point without realizing it, we become incredibly good at preparing for our lives and maybe not as good at actually living them. And I don't say that judgmentally at all. Um, not only have we all done it, I still do it. There are weeks that I'll catch myself thinking, I just need to get through this week. And then I think, wait a second, how many weeks do I want to get through? It's like apparently my long-term strategy for happiness has been to get through approximately 52 of these things every year. And it's like, I think to myself, maybe I need a better plan because you can be 30 and experience this for sure. But there is something that changes when we hit 50-ish. Um, it's not because we're old. 50 isn't old from a general perspective, but there's a ton of research that shows the 50-ish area is statistically when people are the unhappiest. And the major part of that is we're finally old enough to understand something intellectually that we've always known mathematically. And that is we're not going to be here forever. That's a hell of a realization when it really hits you, when you really spend time and think about it. Um, at 30, we knew that. Of course we did, but did we really believe it? Probably not, not unless you'd experienced something that really shocked your system. Um, at 30, there was so much time. We could do it later. We could fix it later, we could take a trip later, uh, we could change jobs. If the health was sideways, we could get healthy later, we could always spend more time together later. And then somehow, feeling like it's overnight, we're 50. And now we start to do this weird bath. And if we're lucky enough to live until 80, that's 30 more summers. 30. That number feels different when we say it like that. And I'm not saying that to be depressing. In fact, I think it might be the opposite. So it's one of those things where as you think through it, I started to think to myself, I wonder if there's actually research behind this idea that we're constantly expecting our future lives to somehow feel better. And there is, there's a ton of it. But researchers have studied something and they called it the life satisfaction forecasting tool. And basically, here's what it did: it said, how happy do we think we're going to be in the future? And then they measure that against what actually happens when the future arrives. And what they found, not surprisingly, was when we're younger, we tend to be more optimistic. You know, we expect our future lives to be more satisfying than they actually turn out to be. Um, that sounds negative and and uh, you know, pessimistic, but it's just a fact. And it really makes complete sense when you think of it this way. We spend a majority of our lives saying, when I get there, then I'll be happy, then I'll relax, uh, then I'll feel successful, then I'll feel like I'm not only enough, but I have enough. And then what ends up happening when we get there is we're still us, nothing's really changed. And there's always more that we could do, or there's more that we could have. And that feels really inconvenient at times, but it's just a fact of life. So the milestones that we accomplish, even though they're amazing and we should be proud of those, they don't necessarily alleviate anxiety. They simply get replaced with new ones because we still worry, we still compare ourselves to other people on Facebook. Um, we still want things that we don't have, which inherently isn't bad, but people can obsess over that. And we still wake up some mornings in a bad mood for absolutely no reason, you know? And no matter what stage of life you are, you're still going to be in a position where there's some people that just annoy the hell out of you. And uh, and that's just part of life. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. But with that said, you end up in a position to where um you're not really sure how to proceed sometimes because you feel like you're always trying to arrive, right? You're never actually just being, you're always trying to become whatever it is that you're actually looking to do. And I don't necessarily have the answer. And maybe that's where the mistake comes in. Maybe we've been asking the circumstances of our lives really to create the feeling that we need when the circumstances of our lives really aren't capable of creating that. Maybe it comes from a different place. And I'm not saying that uh circumstances don't matter. Uh of course, your circumstances matter. You know, the fact that you've got enough money to be able to survive and do the things you want to do, that matters. Uh, where your health is at, your health matters. The relationships you have, they matter. The work and the passions that we have, those matter. I'm not suggesting that, you know, we should stop trying to make our lives better. I certainly want more. I still have goals. I'm sure you have all kinds of goals yourself. So for me, what I've learned is there's a difference between building a future and constantly living in the future. Because if we're always waiting for the next version of our lives, we're never actually in this one. So sometimes it's funny because it's the rich and famous that have some of the darkest days. Because all that they've ever sought after, the more that we're talking about, the things that if this could happen, I would be happy. In their case, they've all come true. So all of a sudden they've woke up realizing I have everything I've ever wanted and nothing's actually changed. So there's no more deluding themselves with hope that if only, then I would be happy because if only knocked on their door, and they still found that inside themselves there was a hole. So I don't want this to become one of those, you know, live like it's your last day type sessions, because um nobody is actually doing that. So that's not realistic. You know, we have responsibilities, we have jobs, we have families, we have bills. Uh, we can't spend every Tuesday watching the sunset and reflecting on the miracle of just existing. Though there are times where that's a fantastic thing to do, but there's a lot of Tuesdays where we actually just have to pick up and end up going to Costco, right? That's life. But maybe that's exactly the point that Costco is part of it. The boring stuff that we do, it counts. The days when nothing memorable happens, those days count. The drive to work counts, sitting on the couch with somebody that you've sat with for many years. Um, that counts. You know, so all these things really matter. It's not a matter that it's it's always got to be the big things that we end up putting on the scoreboard. So when you think in terms of everything you experience, the the random events and the conversations you have with friends where nothing really important comes out of it, those are those are really big deals. So we tend to end up measuring our lives, though, it feels like, by the overall highlights, right? The vacations, uh, the promotions, the weddings, the birthdays, the big accomplishments, the plaques, the awards, all those things are incredible. But how much of our actual lives do those things represent? You know, 5%, maybe 10. You know, what about the other 90%? Because that's where we're living. And it's really easy to go years and we treat that 90% like it doesn't matter. And it fires me up because I'm guilty of it too. You know, there's another strange thing as you get older, and I'll use 50 again as kind of the bar. We can look backwards now. We have enough distance. So think about something we desperately wanted 20 years ago, something that we were absolutely convinced would change everything. And maybe we got it, and maybe we didn't. But either way, here we are now. And there will probably be something we're chasing today that when we're 70 years old, we will look back and think, why did I spend so much time worrying about that? I'd love to know what that thing is, right? Because maybe we would stop worrying about it now and we'd save ourselves 20 years of stress over something that doesn't matter. But unfortunately, wisdom, we usually get that after the fact. If we could uh, you know, if we could see into the future, it'd be a great thing. Um, but I'm not sitting here saying I've got this figured out. I certainly haven't, you know, that's probably what I, you know, think about the most is kind of where things are and where I'm at and uh and the direction I need to go. But we're figuring this out together. So because maybe 50 isn't the age when we finally have all the answers, maybe it's the age when we finally start asking better questions. And one of those questions might be what exactly are we waiting for? When things calm down and everything is close to perfect? I mean, come on, man. We we know that's never going to happen. You know, when everyone we love is healthy, we know every year we get older, the people around us have a higher likelihood of not being healthy. Um, so that's not something we're guaranteed. And if so, it's temporary. Are we worried about when we have enough money? Well, we do have an incredible ability to move that number, um, though it feels like there's never enough. Uh, and probably the biggest one is I think a lot of us think, you know, when everything settles down and I finally stop having problems. Well, good luck with that, right? That's the opposite side of the coin. I mean, that's just pleasure and pain. That's what life is made up of. So the fact that our lives go completely sideways and tragedy strikes and unforeseen things happen, those those things aren't unlucky. It's it's the game plan of how life works. It's inevitable. If you live in this existence, you're going to experience those things. So, you know, if those are the conditions that you need to be happy, it's a surefire way to live life with an underlying unhappiness that we can't ever seem to put our finger on. So maybe the life we're waiting for, maybe it's one of those things where it isn't coming. And maybe that's not really bad news. Um, maybe it's actually really freeing because it means we don't have to keep waiting for some imaginary future version of ourselves to give us permission to enjoy what we already have. You know, so we don't have to abandon ambition and wanting to accomplish things. We don't have to stop growing, and we certainly don't have to pretend like everything's perfect. You know, we can want, you know, tomorrow to be better than today is without requiring tomorrow to be better, to be okay today. You know, I think that's one of the main things personally that I'm trying to uh incorporate all the time. Because someday isn't a place. It's just a word we've been using to kind of postpone things, if you will. And maybe the hardest part of turning 50 is realizing that someday already showed up. It just didn't really look like we thought it would. It looked like today, you know. So I guess I'll leave you with this, and that would be you know, maybe the life that we've been waiting for isn't coming because maybe we're already living it. Thanks for tuning in.