Social Depression

There is nothing more tantalizing than living by expectations that you can not live up to on a daily basis. This will create more suffering than what is necessary. Let's face it, there is enough suffering to go around by just being born into the human race. Suffering is part of life, but what incapacitates people, is the unnecessary suffering. Suppose you expect yourself to be happy all the time (and I know people who do) and when you encounter negative experiences that fail this expectation, you descend into depression. Many relationships and marriages falter due to failed expectations of the other person. A lot of negative experiences can be prevented or repaired because there is power to human effort and persistence, but certainly not all can be mended.

The process by which we make decisions can be rather complex. When a person is younger, he/she can afford to sacrifice a few bad decisions as long as they are not of a severe nature, such as committing a crime that will warrant a prison sentence. When we get older, our chances become narrow and there isn't as much room for errors as there once was when we were younger.In short, success is fifty percent chance and fifty percent planning. Therefore, it is important to deliberate about means (which is what you can control) and the rest is left up to outcomes.

There is a prevailing notion in American culture that believes there is no such thing as reality and that all of life is perception. This model was widely believed and proliferated by the famous empiricist, David Hume. Hume believed that there was no such concept as reality being independent of perception. He thought that reality was dependent upon perception and that the objects one sees are just sensations generated by our own perceptions. Just about all of our psychology grows out of Hume.

I once had a dispute with a colleague who emphatically stated the claim that the table his coffee cup was sitting on was nothing more than a image of our perception. I ask him if he always sat his coffee cup on objects that did not exist. He became furious with me and accused me of "mentally master bating" (a stone used by psychotherapists to throw at you when they don't like what you are saying).

In essence, much of our happiness stems from accepting that sometimes we can do nothing, at least immediately, about life's challenges. This in no way negates that we should not try. We need to understand that life isn't some rosy bowl of cherries. "I'm not ok and you're not ok and that's ok that we are not ok" can really bring a lot of happiness and contentment to our lives, or at least it has to mine. This attitude takes an enormous amount of pressure off of everyone and we become much more tolerant of each other.

So, follow your dreams and formulate good plans. Take the "beginner's mind" approach to life and remember that the "expert" has only a narrow field of knowledge and is confined by his/her expertise. Experts are great consultants. They don't know everything! The most successful people typically have a back log of failures in their portfolio.