Life is 50-50

Life is not supposed to be happy all of the time.  Life has about 50% positive 50% negative, and that’s just how life is.  Even if you are rich, even if you got your dream job, or if you weigh your perfect weight, we all still have ups and downs in our life.

Think about it- would you want to be happy all of the time?  Would you want to feel happy if a loved one died?  Plus, if we were happy all of the time, we wouldn’t even have a concept of happiness.  It would just be normal.  

Humanity is about experiencing a range of emotions, and 100% happy is not a logical goal.  Likewise, we should not run from potential negative feelings.  So many of us fill our lives with overeating, overdrinking, over Facebooking or over shopping to try and avoid negativity in any way.

It is normal for humans to seek pleasure and avoid pain.  But in our world today, the pleasure can come in such concentrated, intense forms.  Imagine our ancestors receiving pleasure from eating some berries.  Neurotransmitters transmitting the satisfaction of eating this sustenance ensured we ate to produce the energy needed to outrun a predator if one came along.  Now we have to adapt these primitive neural patterns to the current world.  

Eating sugar still gives us an emotional sense of pleasure, a spike of dopamine or serotonin.  But now we have highly refined sugars like candy bars that are usually only a few minutes at most out of reach.  We have concentrated pleasures such as alcohol, online shopping, porn, and drugs that make us feel intensely powerful emotions quickly.  We adapt our primitive circuits to this level of stimulation.

Does this make us happier?  Since we can have such instant pleasure do we have higher and higher happiness levels?  We probably all know now that trying to only feel positive emotions by escaping only heightens the negative feelings we are trying to resist, or brings another set of problems.

Though it may be tempting to binge watch Netflix instead of preparing our presentation for the next day, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain in this instance would probably cause us more pain when the time came for us to stand up and present in front of everyone the next day.  Plus we get good at what we practice, so if we habitually buffer to avoid our feelings, that is what we continue to want to do.

We must realize that life is meant to be 50-50.  About half of the time in life there are things that are not pleasurable, but this does not mean we need to avoid negative feelings or try to buffer to avoid them (which only makes the negative feelings stronger).  

Feelings are just vibrations in our body, and our bodies are capable of feeling all of the positive and negative emotions.  Being willing to feel our feelings, notice them, and accept them is the way to avoid buffering and seeking happiness in the moment regardless of the  long term cost.

I remember once when I was young I saw a program about people who were born without the ability to feel pain.  I thought how great that would be, no matter what you did you would not feel pain.  As I continued to watch, I started to understand how wrong I had initially been.  These people were not invincible, they still damaged their bodies.  But without the feedback from their sensory system telling the brain that something was wrong, they could cause lasting, permanent damage if they were not careful.  The pain signals we feel actually allow us to keep ourselves healthy and prevent us from continuing to injure ourselves.

Could this be like emotions too?  Pain can teach us, we can learn from pain.  And our attempts to avoid pain at all costs may put us in a vulnerable position for damaging ourselves more severely.  

In order to feel happy we have to embrace unhappiness.  If we are running from the negative feelings that are a part of life, avoiding them by buffering, then we will never truly know happiness.