Life is difficult for everyone

Have you ever wondered why life is difficult? Why is it that often what we fantasize about barely comes true and if it does, it is not as we had imagined? Sometimes, our mind generates that feeling of emotional suffering through our thoughts. Now, is life difficult for everyone or just for some?

The truth is that everything depends on the perspective from which you observe the world and the attitude you adopt to face routine. Can encounter emotional suffering in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Maybe we worry for the past or for the future. We can be angry or sad, feel bored, stressed, annoyed by physical pain… The important thing is what we do with this string of feelings.

Life is difficult for human beings

Maybe the problem is that we have not evolved to be happy . Natural selection has its objectives. Among them is to reproduce successfully, which means surviving the time necessary to mate, find a partner, and then help our children survive.

Natural selection and other forces of nature They don’t worry about us enjoying life. Our happiness doesn’t matter to them. However, it does concern us, and not a little.

It makes sense that we would like to be able to enjoy our lives while we are here.. This does not seem to be asking too much, although the survival of humanity is also necessary. But the reality is that We do not stop struggling, fighting to be happy. Many people find life difficult, this is often seen in psychology offices, on the streets, in homes, etc.

There is no friend, partner or family member that we know who does not find life as a kind of emotional challenge. This leads us to think that life is not a bed of roses, far from it.

Have we evolved to be unhappy?

In a sense, yes. As we have commented, what counts for natural selection It is the survival of the species. Certain instincts and intellectual abilities that have helped humanity as a whole have also created certain consequences that are quite negative for us as individuals.

And our thoughts have not changed much since homo sapiens appeared. This hominid used his brain to do all kinds of wonderful things conducive to survival.

Homo sapiens thought abstractly, planned for the future, found new solutions to problems, and traded with their neighbors. But not everything was going well millions of years ago.

The brains of homo sapiens also caused them problems. They worried about lions, rhinos and hippos. They were envious of their neighbors, who lived in larger caves and on hot days they argued over who was going to fetch water. Homo sapiens became irritable when it was cold and rainy. He remembered how good it was in the sun. He became concerned when the trees did not bear fruit and insect larvae were scarce.

Even when everything was going well, homo sapiens also thought about the things that had gone wrong in the past. past and where things could go wrong in the future. At that moment they had a great chance of survival, that’s true, but they still felt worried.

In a sense, things haven’t changed much over the past forty thousand years. Our brains continue to cause us a lot of headaches (pun intended).

Maybe we are too smart for things to go well for us

As human beings, in addition to pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, we have other faculties that have made our survival possible. By themselves, our sensory organs are quite ineffective if we find ourselves abandoned in the middle of nature.

What we do have is an extraordinary capacity to reason and plan. This ability allowed us to survive in the wild world by “thinking.” Our ancestors brought us to the position of dominators (and destroyers if we are not careful) of the planet.

However, the ability to think often makes us miserable. The acts of reflecting and planning, however useful they may be, are at the very root of our emotional distress. Unlike other tools, we are not able to put them aside when we do not need them.

Thinking makes us worry about the future feeling regret for the past and constantly comparing ourselves to others. Ultimately, through our mind, we make life difficult.

Thought is responsible for making life difficult

Our constant brooding makes it very difficult to be truly satisfied for more than a short period of time.. Life is difficult because thinking can make it impossible for us to enjoy a good meal, a concert, or fall asleep when night falls.

Our reflections can make our feelings embark on an incessant roller coaster. According to our thoughts, emotions They boost our mood up or down.

And today we are intelligent, friendly and successful, and tomorrow we are clumsy, rejected or failures. The most casual observation of our minds can reveal that we are compulsive thinkers.

Maybe you are asking yourself the following question: Could we stop thinking to be happier? That is the question. We can’t stop thinking to make life easier, p But we can learn to tolerate and accept our thoughts. And life is difficult, for everyone, but we can all make it a little easier if we train our minds for it.

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