The Present is Enough

We like to imagine that we will be happy once we reach our goals.

When you buy a nice car, a new phone. If you could just get promoted at work, if you could just be with that person.

Yet our lives are fragmented into micro task that we do every moment. Including now.

When you’re making coffee in the morning, when you’re about to leave the house, when you got home after working for a day, when you’re having lunch with your colleagues, when your plane gets delayed at the airport.

We always live in this “after this, then that” mode. Always chasing something. Waiting for something. Worrying about an outcome. Always moving from one damn thing to another.

Remember when you were a kid, it’s in the afternoon and it’s getting dark. You were playing with your friends and your parents asked you to go inside, and you wanted to play a little longer?

Imagine going back to such moments, when you were free of obligations, of being an adult, of having a deadline.

I’ve heard that life is just ordinary tuesdays.

There are studies that show that people who get paralyzed and those who won the lottery has the same level of happiness a year after the event has occured.

There is also a study that tracks income level with happiness and apparently beyond 75-90k USD every year (around 30 million IDR per month adjusted for inflation and PPP), more money does not increase your happiness.

The key, then, is to structure your life such that every mundane things are enjoyable. When the present is enough by itself.

Being happy, it seems, does not happen when you reach your goals but when you stop desiring for more.