Unfortunately, most of us live our lives unconsciously, busily going from one thing to the next without reflecting on our motivations, values, and the deeper meaning of our lives. Living this way leaves us vulnerable to letting normal ups and downs trigger a wide range of temporary emotional experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant, which dominate our lives.
All too often, we wind up reacting to the challenges and opportunities in our lives instead of responding to them with clarity and wisdom. When we react, it is usually an unconscious action arising from and colored by an emotion such as fear, surprise, anger, or joy. As I will discuss later, when we’re caught up in an emotion it is difficult to see events clearly, often causing us to be reactive. To use a common analogy, it is a lot like trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic to make it as comfortable as possible instead of focusing on turning the ship in the direction of safety. We are able to find temporary pleasures here and there, but unable to direct our lives in a way that is most meaningful.
We can develop the ability to overcome our reactive tendencies with mindfulness. When we are mindful, we are able to recognize our emotions being triggered and not get caught up in them. We can pause, bring awareness into the moment, and reflect upon the most beneficial way to respond, both in the moment and in the long-term. In this way, we empower ourselves to make conscious choices that cultivate lasting well-being for ourselves and others.
Another model we can use to illustrate how easy it is to fall into the trap of confusing short-term, stimulus-driven pleasure with genuine happiness is the Eight Worldly Concerns. The Eight Worldly Concerns is a Buddhist teaching that illustrates how our preoccupation with temporary happiness actually creates more long-term suffering. Although it stems from Buddhist philosophy, this is a universal teaching that clearly applies to all of us. If we examine them closely, we find these are primary motivating factors, either consciously or unconsciously, in nearly everything we do. They are:
• Gain and loss: We are happy when we get what we want and not happy when we lose things or people we like. Thus, we spend a lot of time and energy trying to get what we want and avoid losing what we have.
• Pleasure and pain: It is quite natural that we enjoy pleasurable experiences and want to avoid pain. Usually, from the moment we get out of bed in the morning, we are trying to find and engage in pleasurable activities and avoid painful ones.
• Praise and criticism: We like it when people praise us and we don’t like it when people criticize us. On subtle levels, we spend a lot of time seeking validation from others and avoiding their displeasure.
• Good reputation and bad reputation (also called fame and insignificance): We want people to think highly of us, and we don’t feel good when others think ill of us or believe we don’t have much to offer.
Having these motivations is normal and not a problem in and of itself. There’s nothing wrong with seeking the things we need and trying to avoid losing them, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, appreciating validation from others, and having a good reputation. The problem comes when we allow these temporary concerns to override our long-term well-being and happiness. Because such worldly concerns are stimulus driven, they are temporary and, rather than cultivate meaning, they often create worry, rumination, and unnecessary suffering when we allow them to be our primary guiding motivation. As with all stimulus-driven pleasures and pains, we need to remember their limitations.
The problem is, over time, we have become so habituated by these worldly concerns that they become our default motivations. We constantly make decisions and engage in activities with them as our primary concern without factoring in or reflecting on our values. In the quest to get what we want, be accepted by others, or just feel good, we often go against our own values in ways so subtle that we aren’t even aware of them. When we are in alignment with our values, we do the right thing regardless of gain or loss, pain or pleasure, praise or criticism, good or bad reputation, and we feel much better about ourselves.
What others think about us is not nearly as important as what we think about ourselves. It is important to bring reflection and wisdom into our choices. If we value honesty, it is important to tell our boss or our friends the truth when we make a mistake, regardless of worldly concerns. If we constantly try to avoid pain or challenges, we wind up creating bigger problems.
It’s often healthy to deal with a difficult situation, endure a little pain, or put off pleasure for a beneficial long-term result. We teach our children about delayed gratification, yet forget to apply it in our own lives. Rather than reacting to feelings and desires that arise, it’s important to take a moment to reflect on making healthy choices that contribute to a durable lasting well-being and a life we define as meaningful.
“If you can change your mind, you can change your life.” WILLIAM JAMES
One of the most important realizations I have come to over the past thirty years—the essence of the inspiration for this book—is that most people, given the opportunity to reflect, already know how to improve the quality of their lives.
When I taught high school, my students could easily make a list of five things they could do to improve their lives. Yet, despite being able to make such a list, most of those students (like the vast majority of people in this world) were unable to follow through and actually do the things they listed. I’m sure all of us can relate to this. We are all aware of some simple things we could do to improve the quality of our lives right now and, for some reason, we don’t do them.
Recognizing this dynamic challenged me to ask one of the most important questions of my life: What is it that prevents me from doing the things I know are healthy and beneficial? If I valued honesty, why did I lie? If I wanted to help people, why did I hurt them? If I wanted to be healthy, why did I do unhealthy things?
It turns out that I was not unique. The inability to answer these questions is a nearly universal problem, affecting almost all human beings. One of our biggest problems is that we rarely ever ask ourselves where the resistance to being the person we want to be comes from. The primary obstacle preventing us from being able to make healthy and productive changes in our own lives is not our circumstances, nor a lack of knowledge about what to do, it is our untrained mind. We have untrained minds that are conditioned by our experiences, habits, and tendencies and are constantly producing thoughts and emotions that draw our attention away from being present and able to make wise choices.
The best explanation of this phenomenon that I have found comes from one of the scholars I mentioned earlier, B. Alan Wallace, who calls it obsessive compulsive delusional disorder. This is not a disorder you will find in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); rather, it is a pervasive condition of the mind that nearly everyone has.
The first point Wallace makes is that the mind is obsessive in its constant production of thoughts, images, emotions, and desires. This is easy to verify; just try to keep your mind free from thoughts for a minute or two, and watch what happens. When we try this, we notice something quite