Why do we suffer?

We smile, in front of people and try to keep up an act of actually being happy. Your social media might be completely filled with all those lovely pictures you have with your loving family and amazing friends of yours. But then why does it feel like this? So..so miserable and suffering with constant thoughts of how ‘nobody loves me’, ‘I am not enough’ or how ‘I have nothing to be happy about’. Is this really the truth though? Or is it just us making our own lives, living hells? Destroying ourselves. We as humans are capable of making changes, for the good? You got it. For the bad? You got it. What we many a times do not understand is that, despite having everything a normal person could possibly want and dream of, we are throwing it all away  because of our actions and because of the way we are thinking. It is said we make our own future, that it is in our hands how and what our future turns out to be. That we are responsible for everything that occurs in our lives. There are so many proverbs and stories to prove this right. It is true if a person works tirelessly each and everyday towards their goals, they are going to achieve everything they want in life.

The biggest example for this can be taken from all those criminal novels and television shows that we see. A person living a pretty well off life destroys everything that he or she has in want of something more or just being paranoid of something that might not even be there, thus eventually getting themselves involved in hideous crimes to get what they want. It is almost like people do willingly want to be the one to kill their happiness with their own hands. We might not understand the reach to where our thoughts can go, but one wrong move and the whole thing falls down. We need to be careful about what we think and do about it in our lives. Whenever a particularly famous person commites suicide, everyone just goes like why did the person commit suicide? They literally had everything! But what we don’t understand and see here is that their actions and thoughts might have been distorted and screwed just like any other normal person’s. Just how people can simply destroy their lives by thinking and overthinking about everything and nothing, is almost scary in a way. So we need to keep a check on things and try to understand ourselves better.

We as humans have this overwhelming urge to constantly compare ourselves to others, the point here to understand is that no matter where you stand there is always going to be someone above you and if you keep on comparing yourself and your life to the other person, you are bound to destroy your own lives and your thoughts about your own self. Everything comes at a cost, so does comparison, comparing yourself to the other person who is above you, always putting yourself down thinking about the other person, wanting something more than you actually have right now, the need to have more, just something more. This destroys you, makes you overthink everything and make your own life hell. Do you realise that you are doing this to yourself? Putting yourself down because of your own thoughts? This is what we need to stop doing constantly comparing ourselves to every other person out there. Many a times we do things without even realising that we are doing them and how much of a negative impact these can have on you.

There is a saying by Shakespeare where he says that “He is happy, because he is free from any kind of expectations” and this goes for expectations from others or be it oneself too. I know it’s hard not to keep expectations but we need to keep them to the minimum because when we have low expectations probably life might surprise you and give you something greater, again no expectations. This is another thing that puts us down, we really have almost everything that we could possibly need, but still we expect something bigger and better. For example, suppose it’s your birthday today, you are expecting a birthday party from your parents, but then we forget that we do have parents who love us wholeheartedly and then why does it matter if you do not get a party? You still have everything that you could possibly need. No, I am not saying that you need to stop expecting anything or stopping moving forward, all I am saying is that you need to keep your expectations to the minimum. Just so that you don’t drop yourself into that hell, overthinking and re-thinking everything.

I have already mentioned this point before, overthinking. Overthinking has a major influence on your life, one can go and talk to an overthinker and they will let you know about their routine, that they get up, they overthink and they sleep. Honestly, overthinking takes a huge toll on a person and their life, when you overthink you overanalyze things and try to find an answer for things. If you are an overthinker, you know how an overthinker can come up with something where there is nothing, and just destroy their own peace of mind this way. Overthinking is like a slow killer, you slowly are killing yourself by overthinking, and this is not only because you are thinking a lot but also because you tend to think negatively, whenever one analyses a situation they mostly analyse it in a negative manner. This is a tendency with humans, we mostly see the negative side of a thing when trying to analyse it. Consider a situation, you are living a good life, you are prospering in areas that are setting steps for your future and making it brighter, and now you don’t really have anything you can overthink about, so you take in the problems of other people, from other people’s lives and stress then our over it and destroy their peace. Now this might seem idiotic to some people, but this is the actual situation that people go through, it is almost like they are addicated to this feeling of stressing out and overthinking all the time, that when they don’t have anything to overthink about they just try and dig for something so. This is a very harmful practice and by doing this we are just using our power of control to destroy ourselves completely.

Our thoughts are obviously not under our control all the time and thus sometimes neither are our actions. But we can take little steps and try to understand ourselves better at times.. question ourselves why do I have these thoughts? Is there a particular reason for them? And though you might not get an answer instantly, like I said, baby steps. Every time you have any such distorting or disturbing thought, stop and think, maybe it will help you get better and not have these thoughts haunt you all the time. As I said earlier, you hold the power to change your future and your actions according to it, just have a little faith in yourself and explore everything you can and move forward. Don’t let your thoughts make your well off life be turned into a living hell.