The Tragedy Of Convenient Survival

Only 200 years ago, majority of people’s life was spent gathering enough food and shelter to survive. In 2023, you are living a better quality of life than Presidents & Kings 200 years ago. We have the technology that makes surviving easy, but so many people are not living. So many of us just drift along in our day, oblivious to how great it is to be alive in this era.

That doesn’t mean you need to spend all your days trying to become Jeff Bezos or Oprah Winfrey. I’d argue you just need to recognize how lucky we are to be alive, take a deep breath, and appreciate the present moment. Appreciate the fridge that keeps your food cold. Appreciate the plumbing that delivers fresh hot and cold water directly into your home. Appreciate that our family and friends can be contacted from thousands of miles away on a video call.

Our brains are hard wired to worry. Worrying about the past and future used to be a valuable survival tactic. It forced us to mentally prepare for a lion or a snake looking for something (us) to eat.

The tragedy of living in an era of convenient survival is that our brains are still hard wired to worry. Our brain finds something to worry about, which leads to us worrying about that interaction we had four years ago, an inconvenience in our day, or that work meeting today.

If we really think about it, the past and future are figments of our imagination. The only thing that exists is the present moment.

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” - Michel de Montaigne

Breathe, accept the present moment, and take it one moment/task/interaction at a time ❤️