You’ll Always Have Problems, No Matter What You Do

FEB 08, 2015

Some people are doing huge world-changing things. They complain about their problems. Some people are doing small, unimportant things. They complain about their problems. The amount of time they spend fixing their problems is roughly the same – some small variation, maybe. You find some guy being depressed that he lost $100. You find another guy with the same level of depression that he lost $1m. As you scale up, your emotional state at any one point will always be the same roughly. You will adjust to match whatever you are doing. Your emotions are there to guide you when things are extreme, so you can move back to the middle. So they will establish a base-line around what is currently considered normal in your life. What this implies is that no matter what you achieve, you will have similar levels of anger, similar levels of appreciation, and similar levels of niceness. It won’t change; it’s just the scale of then things that trigger them that will change. So if you feel that your emotional state is out of whack — you may as well fix it now. Balance it out properly; don’t believe that some future event will balance it out. You can adjust the extremes that evoke emotions — e.g. the extremes that cause anger or the extremes that cause stress. Another consequence: If you are going to invest so much emotional energy in something, why not make it worthwhile?  By MARK ESSIEN