“Problems in life never end; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded into better problems
“To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action;”
Imagine you didn’t have to work, you could relax on a beach, all day every day for the whole year. You have someone who serves you unlimited drinks and food, You have someone who constantly massages you. The sand you get from the beach is annoying, but that's nothing to worry about, you have the technology and the servants to wash it off. Money is not even something you have to worry about here. No stress from school or work, you don’t even have to get up to do anything, everything comes to you. Remember you’re living like this for the whole year. But here’s the problem, after just two weeks or so you’ll feel insanely bored, you’ll get tired of having people serve you food, and you’ll wanna do it yourself, and you’ll become fat and lazy from the food and drinks, you’ll want to do something, you’ll want to face some challenge.
THIS Eutopia WILL BECOME A PROBLEM.
We need some challenges and problems to keep us going. The somewhat good thing is problems are inevitable, they keep coming and I suppose we keep have to keep solving them.
Life is full of problems and suffering, and you have to voluntarily accept it and be content with it, that's what Jordan Peterson says.
“Our struggles determine our successes.”
There is this theme some self-help and business books talk about; It is to not chase success or money but chase problems and solve them, and success will come.
The greater the problems, the better the success once we overcome those problems. Google solved the problem of taking the effort to find information from thousands of pages of encyclopedias. Amazon solved the trouble of having to go to the store. Of course, there are other factors that play into success and money, this is just one of them.
We all have our ambitions, somewhere we would like to reach, it feels good to imagine how it would feel. However, to get there we need to think about the problems
Like if I want to become a writer, I’ll have to think about the problems I’ll face with getting recognition and standing out, the writer's blocks I’ll face, the consistency I have to keep up, and so on. But the problems are not to put me away from my goals, but by focusing on solving these problems are when I can get closer to my goals. I have to focus on overcoming these problems to reach closer to my goals. To get on the top of the class I’ll face problems with motivation. I’ll face problems with consistency, therefore, I should focus on how to fix these issues. A bonus thing I suppose is that solving problems is satisfying. Writing down all the problems around you even the minor ones, and thinking of solving them is also fun.
What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?
This is a question I found helpful, in seeing what I want to pursue ahead in life. If I want to see if being a coder is for me, I can ask myself, Will I be up to tapping keys for hours in front of a screen to make a code? perhaps not. I’m sure there are people who are up for that, but it doesn't seem like something I’d want to do.
If I want to pursue writing, I can ask myself, am I ready to spend the hours to type something like this and read pages upon pages of information? Yes I’d love to
Premeditato Malorum
This also brings us to something the stoics practiced, Premeditato Malorum, or Negative visualization of what can go wrong before you do something. Now you might think this leads to overthinking, but this is to keep us safe from the problems which might arise. For example, you want to do some school work, but before you do, imagine everything that you don’t want to happen and what could go wrong, like you could open Youtube and start watching videos instead of studying. See what you can do to prevent those things from happening and then study.
The approach of looking at problems is something that has fascinated and helped me, Its something I ought to practice more as well.
I hope you liked this one, thanks for reading :)