Posted on 08 Sep, 2010 -
The Problem with Modern Life…
Dissatisfied, depressed and stressed?
Or are we just over-demanding and spoiled?
Happiness in humility… Responsibility instead of rights
Dear Reader,
According to the subtitle of a book I’m reading at the moment, “Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy’.
And it’s not just this book. Everywhere I turn, I read facts or articles or overhear people talking about how stressed, depressed, exhausted and disappointed we are ‘these days’.
“But hang on a minute.” I hear myself saying. When exactly were these halcyon days when nobody had to work hard, worry about money or lose loved ones to illness and war? When were these days when nobody had to do jobs they didn’t enjoy and everyone felt satisfied, happy and calm - and enjoyed high levels of self esteem, financial comfort and happiness?
Eh? Because therein, in fact, lies part of the problem. Rather than comparing our lives to those of people in the past, we tend to hold them up against some ideal of perfection and happiness that itself makes us dissatisfied and disappointed.
A lot of the problem, in fact, comes from the fact that we are spoilt.
Our lives are no harder, more stressful or more miserable than they have been in the past. We have just somehow come by the idea that our lives should not be difficult… that we should enjoy large amounts of happiness… and that we should have jobs that we enjoy, wonderful relationships and a life of celebration and holiday every day.
Give us equality and we start wanting superiority and fame. Give us freedom from hunger and we complain about being fat. Give us the minimum wage and a 35 hour week and we start sporting bags that read “Born to Shop, Forced to Work’.
As my grandfather used to say, we don’t know we’re born.
We believe that we deserve or should be entitled to so much
To go back to the book that I accused of over-egging the case for unhappiness earlier, Michael Foley’s ‘The Age of Absurdity - Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy’, does actually contain a lot of ideas I would agree with.
One I like in particular is the idea that we all believe that we DESERVE so much these days.
“Everyone now deserves a holiday (meaning not just a break but a trip abroad to a desirable location… students invariably deserve higher grades… employees deserve promotion… lovers deserve a dream partner next time (not despite but because of all the past failures they themselves probably caused but for which they accept no responsibility).”
We expect to be able to have plenty of money.. yet we don’t want to work for it. We expect not just food but tasty and nutritious meals… We want strawberries in the winter. Cool offices in the summer. And good sex, good fun, and good health all-year-round as a standard.
If we are so darn depressed and dissatisfied as everyone always says, is part of the problem not that our expectations are so high… and our willingness to put up with any kind of hardship so low?
Call us busy if you like. Call us greedy. Call us dysfunctional… disassociated.... dissatisfied. But please don’t let us moan about how hard our lives are.
High expectations - low virtues?
Humility and Gratitude, are perhaps two potential antidotes for this situation. The more grateful we are for what we have - and the less we feel we deserve - then the more satisfied we will be.
Another interesting idea that Foley points out in his book is that we perhaps have too much self-esteem these days.
While we are often told that self-esteem is great and that we should all have it… it can go too far.
“The problem with self-esteem is that it has no values or principles and does not even require effort.”
This may sound a bit harsh but we are in danger of becoming a society full of people who think they are amazing - yet may be selfish, stupid, mean, talentless and ****** (add or amend your own list of adjectives there).
Several new studies have shown, in fact, that people with high self-esteem can be both unpleasant to be around and actually more dissatisfied with life.
“If the world does not comply with the demands of a high self-estimate, and the world is frequently slow to oblige, the outraged self-believer may resort to violence to make the world fall into line.”
The benefits of humility
Ironically, we can actually find a greater sense of satisfaction by working on improving our own shortcomings than trying to earn recognition for our good traits and talents.
We can also take strength in believing, as 18th Century Scottish dramatist, David Mallet does in this quote that “Affliction is the wholesome soil of virtue, where patience, honor, sweet humility, and calm fortitude, take root and strongly flourish.”
Another quote that really got me thinking, in fact, was from Gandhi who said:
“I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”
Because another downside about this world of high standards of expectation and perfection is that we can also suffer at the hands of the high standards of morality, achievement and success that we expect of ourselves.
If we expect ourselves to err then we can enjoy the process of trying to become better people. If we are more humble in our view of our importance then we can actually take greater pride in the small yet important roles that we do play in life.
If we take responsibility for everything we do instead of making demands of everything that happens to us then we can have greater control of our destiny and greater satisfaction in ourselves.
Best wishes
