Falsified futures

The average person is inundated with problems. Paying bills, friend drama, stuck working 14 hour days, a relative got scammed by the random New Jersey number that called saying they had all 12 of their nieces held hostage in a salt mine. 

It appears that most people want to escape their current realities and live in falsehood. People are overwhelmed so they pass time drinking at a bar. They plan a vacation 6 months out and that's all they can think about. They have a wedding planned in 18 months and that’s all they can think about. They are addicted to Netflix everyday after work. Nobody in the present moment, always an altered, or future state on their mind, that falsely promises a better feeling.

Your entire life will pass if you are always thinking ahead of the better times yet to come. Addressing the factors that make you feel you want to escape out of the present moment is not attractive, but when done, will yield such better results.

I was having relationship problems and wanted to escape my vortex of emotional stress. I convinced myself that being in the loud crowded city of Madrid wasn't helping, and that if I could find myself on a peaceful, tranquil farm all of my problems would be relieved. I would have the clarity to think things through and forget about what sent me running to a farm.

I ventured out to a rural property in the mountains - trails all around, sheep I could play with, fresh eggs every morning. A dream, I had been living to do this! Only to find that when I sat with the couple who lived on the farm, within the first few minutes of our initial conversation, I picked up on an underlying tension between them. 

This tension soon accelerated when I introduced what I thought would be an innocent topic, and it resulted in a conversation about family problems.

I was now living in exactly what I was trying to escape. I suddenly felt uncomfortable in the very environment that was supposed to support me, afraid to initiate conversation, afraid to be bothersome.

Funny isnt it? I had my escape, and nothing changed.

Excitement can be paired with future plans, please don't get me wrong. What I want to argue is that if you are only living for your future plans, it's because something is not being fulfilled in the current moment.

If you can see the difference, try and address the issues you have head on so that you can enjoy what is yet to come rather than using it as a tool to escape what you had been feeling before.

If you read my article Scuba Diving (https://alexanderbarr.journopo... ), you can see that at the end I come to the conclusion that the best way to tackle life situations is to act as if you are attached to an oxygen tank. 

We have the luxury of procrastinating our internal work because we can easily surround ourselves with distractions on land, but underwater you need to face everything then and there because you only have so much oxygen.

Life is a paradox, because it is long and short. If you look at this chart below, you may freak out when you fill it in. If you are living in the future, and not the moment, these dots will fill very quickly.

Please use this as a tool for strategic life plans. Thank you for reading.