Dan Faggella - When Everything Becomes Normal

It comes as no shock that some of the people with the most friends, the most money, the most fame and social validation, and the most intelligence are also some of the saddest people on the face of the earth.

Its no surprise, then, that people can some of the “dumbest,” poorest, least well-known people are also the happiest on the face of the earth.

Is this because external benefits necessarily lead to pain, and external “detriments” lead to pleasure? Certainly not.

It's because – on both sides of the coin of life conditions – we get used to things. Our conditions become the norm and loose any tangible effect on our life’s enjoyment.

This understanding seems daunting in the sense that all of our work towards changing our conditions can be recognized as being divorced from our actual quality of life (though this needn’t be the case, as we will see). However, lets look at this interesting facet of the human condition in light of evolution:

Instead, we feel happy in proportion to how we perceive our life conditions to be, in terms of how we assemble the mental puzzle of our life situation and conditions – in terms of the meaning we associate to our lives.

Hence, we do not remain perpetually happy because of an increase in beneficial conditions in our lives. This might lead to unhealthy lethargy (what I pose as a possible evolutionary rationale). Instead we accept our new conditions as baseline and strive for more! Hurray humans! Hence we continue to look for opportunities for more – a tendency that likely served us very well as early humans.

The thing is, this “grasping for more” – even if we get what we’re grasping for – doesn’t entail happiness and fulfillment.

It is possible that we are wired to feel good when we believe we have been “benefitted,” “upgraded,” or “bettered” in some way? Think about it this way:

Again, there would of course be instances where one’s own perception is irrelevant and positive emotions would ensue regardless, such as:

However, in almost all instances where we feel an increase in positive emotional state due to our mental framing of the incident, is it not arguable that our own perceived “benefit” or “upgrade” or “betterment” is the cause of this emotional shift?

Obviously there are other factors to our experience of happiness besides our opinion of how “benefitted” we are. These factors might include (but wouldn’t be limited to):

AGAIN I say “However:” of those instances where we do see notable increase in our own emotional state due to the way we frame our reality / perceive our world, it could be that the idea of being “benefitted” is involved.

This ideal that our positive emotions are increased when we believe we are becoming / experiencing “more” is only one model, but it might be a useful model to look at in light of the rest of this article.

Given the dynamics of our experienced quality of life, we must find ways to frame our experiences (including our memories and anticipated future) in a positive light, in a way that we associate to things we value, possibly in a way that enables us to be “bettered” by the experiences.

We must find meanings in our experience that encourage us and bring about positive emotion in us.

Here are 2 tools that we might use to deal with the fact that we tend to take anything in our lives to be “normal” in short order:

Despite covering the idea of gratitude in the article on the “past,” I wanted to mention it again here in vastly more specific detail – as I believe gratitude of the present to be uniquely important.

Gratitude is understood to bring about positive emotions and aide in our enjoyment of life. The reasoning behind this has been explained by far more qualified people than I, but I think I have a have formulated about as concise a definition as possible, and I’ve never seen it frame this way before:

Gratitude does us the favor of framing anything (potentially, every aspect of our life experience) as a benefit, as something fresh and appreciable. It has the potential to frame our lives entirely in the positive because we can take every sense, every feeling, every event as a gift to our consciousness.

By being grateful in our lives, we immediately are able to appreciate all of life as a poor and starving man might value $20 US.

Instead of coming to our experience with the general perspective of “yep, this is reality,” we come to our experience with the perspective of “wow, this is fantastic!” Bringing this positivity (and even excitement) to the present allows us to perpetuate the feelings of a kid at christmas. Instead of looking at things practically and taking them into consideration, the grateful person can find ways to make any experience seem fun or encouraging.

We can also use a powerful “purpose” to bring empowered meaning into all aspects of our lives. Personally, I think about this in two ways:

2- We establish grand plans for the positive changes we would like to make in our world

These could roughly be referred to as “inner” and “outer” purpose, though I no longer make much of a distinction.

With regards to “inner” purpose, we can make each moment meaningful by exemplifying the kinds of virtues and behaviors that we deem best – we use the present moment as a stage to embody our highest ideals. For instance, if we deeply value learning and sharing enjoyable experiences, we can bring these values to the forefront in any circumstances. If we are as home, we might study something fascinating and important (possibly something that will aide in our external purpose), or we can visit a friend and create enriching experiences with that person. Even standing in line at the bank we can chat with the people next to us or do some reading (Podcasts would be even easier in this instance). In this way, even relatively tragic events or periods can serve to hone us closer to our ideals – and so bring empowering meaning to our lives.

With regards to “outer” purpose, we can take each moment as a potential stepping stone towards our grand vision, towards the change we want to make in our lives. This could be putting away money to save for our child’s education, this could be learning or writing to work towards creating a great book, or it could be putting in effort to start our own company. This outer purpose must of course be aligned with our inner purpose, our ideals about how we want to live and what we want to make for ourselves and for others with human potential. In doing so, we are drawn towards creating concrete outward manifestations of what we value most. This is something that can compel us to enthusiastic action in any moment of our lives. This aides in providing us with empowered meaning.

Dan Faggella spends his life cultivating the practice and understanding of fulfillment and human potential. He currently runs a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu academy and writes his blog at www.lifeexp.wordpress.com.

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