5 Reasons To Keep Going and Not Let Life Get You Down

Here are some observations to help with navigating life. They’re so basic that we can easily miss and forget them, but can also recognize and integrate them when reminded.

1. You can’t always please everyone

You will run into adversity, no matter what. Go into situations accepting that some friction with your world is an immutable reality. By all means reflect on who you upset, understand approximately where you stand in relation to them, what you can learn, and so on — and then move on.

There are potentially others who will oppose you in life, even if you’re doing the right thing. I think of it a bit like a video game. There’s not always a particularly good reason why enemies are chasing my character randomly; I just accept that this is how it is.

2. Progress is not often linear

When I first started investing in the stock market a couple years ago, my impulse was to check on the stock everyday — not recommended. Why? Because it’s up a little, down a little, up a little, down a little, up, down, up…up? Up? Oh, ok. Up, then. A Big down?! Uh oh. Now what?

Same thing with weighing myself. Weight goes up one day, down the next, up, down, up, down, hmm. This is due to fluctuations and cycles of various kinds. Very rarely do we find true straight lines in life progress. Track the macro-level narratives of your life rather than getting caught up in the miniscule noise.

3. Our perception of time is accelerative

When you’re 10 years old, one year is 10% of your life. When you’re 30 years old, one year is 3.3% of your life. When you’re 50, it’s 2%. There’s a reason why my seven month-old son can only sit patiently for about a half hour at a time; for him, a week is about is 3% of his life.

I have memories from my childhood of waiting for my mom to run an errand, while I stayed in the car. It felt like hours. I started to worry something had happened to her, after 10 minutes: like maybe she got lost, or worse. These days, I’m amazed if I can even get anything noteworthy done within a year. Time as we experience it is subjective.

4. There is nothing as consistent in life as change itself

I learned this (generally speaking) from Proust (who wrote In Search of Lost Time). We’re not always aware of the change, because it happens gradually. If you compare day 1 to day 2, you don’t notice anything. Day 3 to day 4, still nothing. And so on. Once you get to day 100, you compare it to day 1, and you see the stark difference.

It helps me to be aware of this change going on, all the time. It’s largely imperceptible to the senses. Knowing about it intellectually, I’m less taken off guard by it. Also, I look for similarities in how things change. I’ll notice something is different, but no sooner, realize it’s similar to what happened before. Life is made up of patterns and cycles.

5. Time is the enemy of society

People in our societies are fixated on time, quite possibly because of its interesting and elusive properties, alluded to above (e.g. subjectivity, imperceptibility, and acceleration).

We are in a constant struggle against time. It’s the reason why people speed on the free way, get impatient in line, are obsessed with anti-aging measures — anything we can do to get a better deal out of time.

With that in mind, realize that you can’t really beat time. Resistance is rather futile. If you’re on a 200-mile road trip, going 75 miles an hour (10 over the hypothetical speed limit), you’ll arrive in 160 minutes. If you’re going 65 miles an hour, you’ll arrive in ~185 minutes.

So we can save a whopping 25 minutes by driving 10 miles over the speed limit for over two and a half hours. Naturally, there’s a speed trap along the way, and we get stopped — or we arrive at our destination early, then complain about having nothing to do.

This is so common that we don’t even think about it. So we can do what? Sit at home and feel bored, or waste a half hour watching a show. Time is the enemy partly because we don’t use it wisely. We rush when it doesn’t even matter, and then the time we do have, we waste.

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You can’t always please everyone, progress is not often linear, our perception of time is accelerative, there is nothing as consistent in life as change itself, and time is the enemy of society. Easy, right?

No wonder we lose track of all this! Still, I’m convinced that these are important lessons that we can all relate to and (more or less) agree on. Maybe if we can get everyone on the same page, life will run more smoothly for us all.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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