adults suck
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/opinion/sunday/new-love-a-short-shelf-life.html?pagewanted=1
This article speaks to the concept that humans are hard-wired to crave novelty. you get euphoric and a brain full of dopamine when you experience something new and exciting. it leads to awesome things like infatuation and bad things like addiction. this is likely not news to most people who are moderately well-read and/or halfway intelligent enough to recognize this behavior in themselves and their peers.
however, the part that annoys me about the article is how it gives people a cop out reason for their lives sucking.
an excerpt:
"It’s cruel but true: We’re inclined - psychologically and physiologically - to take positive experiences for granted. We move into a beautiful loft. Marry a wonderful partner. Earn our way to the top of our profession. How thrilling! For a time. Then, as if propelled by autonomic forces, our expectations change, multiply or expand and, as they do, we begin to take the new, improved circumstances for granted."
what i take from that is that you have to keep life exciting. marry your partner. then travel somewhere awesome with them every year. move to different beautiful lofts. maybe in different cities! redo one of them to look the way you want. take a new position or responsibility at work. change careers altogether if you are bored! see different friends. when you see those friends, go out and do things! spend some money to get something awesome. life is short, why not do these things? if it also keeps life exciting, so much the better!
people, i think, consider people who live their lives like that flighty, unreliable, inconstant, impetuous. these are generally negative adjectives. and i think it's the fact that most people don't want to be defined by negative adjectives that leads people to be boring. and then when they are bored, they just tell themselves it's life. it's biology. I'll never be as happy as i was when i first did _______ anyway. I'll never regain the excitement of my old apartment or my first boyfriend. may as well wallow in my own misery.
so people end up doing things like staying in boring jobs. divorcing a person because the marriage isn't perfect. staying with a person who isn't meeting them halfway just because they're afraid to be alone. watching movies at home instead of seeing friends. turning down invitations because they have to pay their mortgage/rent for their awesome place of residence.
fucking lame. i can't even stand it. and the older i get, the more people get complacent and forget that life stays exciting WHEN YOU MAKE IT THAT WAY. i plan to live in different places and i plan to do great things. often. and people, all the time, tell me i'm unrealistic and i cant just live all over the country and i cant do half the traveling i want to do and i cant change my job every 5 years and I won't be happy with Mike forever. and frankly, I have lived the first 31 years of my life making changes in order to stay happy. i went back to school, and i broke up with my boyfriend of 7 years, and i started running cross-country & track in my senior year, and i started going to anime conventions with a girl i hardly knew, and i applied to Rutgers in my sophomore year of college, and i ran for student council president when i was 12, and i have taken half a dozen vacations i couldn't technically afford. and my life has been consistently awesome. everyone has shitty times and everyone has times where things are boring...but i am spurred on by the idea that my life can STAY awesome as long as i keep trying to keep it that way.
i am fine living my life this way. it's just really annoying to hear people use that same excuse from the article as a reason for their lives sucking and as a reason to tell me im being an idealist.
This article speaks to the concept that humans are hard-wired to crave novelty. you get euphoric and a brain full of dopamine when you experience something new and exciting. it leads to awesome things like infatuation and bad things like addiction. this is likely not news to most people who are moderately well-read and/or halfway intelligent enough to recognize this behavior in themselves and their peers.
however, the part that annoys me about the article is how it gives people a cop out reason for their lives sucking.
an excerpt:
"It’s cruel but true: We’re inclined - psychologically and physiologically - to take positive experiences for granted. We move into a beautiful loft. Marry a wonderful partner. Earn our way to the top of our profession. How thrilling! For a time. Then, as if propelled by autonomic forces, our expectations change, multiply or expand and, as they do, we begin to take the new, improved circumstances for granted."
what i take from that is that you have to keep life exciting. marry your partner. then travel somewhere awesome with them every year. move to different beautiful lofts. maybe in different cities! redo one of them to look the way you want. take a new position or responsibility at work. change careers altogether if you are bored! see different friends. when you see those friends, go out and do things! spend some money to get something awesome. life is short, why not do these things? if it also keeps life exciting, so much the better!
people, i think, consider people who live their lives like that flighty, unreliable, inconstant, impetuous. these are generally negative adjectives. and i think it's the fact that most people don't want to be defined by negative adjectives that leads people to be boring. and then when they are bored, they just tell themselves it's life. it's biology. I'll never be as happy as i was when i first did _______ anyway. I'll never regain the excitement of my old apartment or my first boyfriend. may as well wallow in my own misery.
so people end up doing things like staying in boring jobs. divorcing a person because the marriage isn't perfect. staying with a person who isn't meeting them halfway just because they're afraid to be alone. watching movies at home instead of seeing friends. turning down invitations because they have to pay their mortgage/rent for their awesome place of residence.
fucking lame. i can't even stand it. and the older i get, the more people get complacent and forget that life stays exciting WHEN YOU MAKE IT THAT WAY. i plan to live in different places and i plan to do great things. often. and people, all the time, tell me i'm unrealistic and i cant just live all over the country and i cant do half the traveling i want to do and i cant change my job every 5 years and I won't be happy with Mike forever. and frankly, I have lived the first 31 years of my life making changes in order to stay happy. i went back to school, and i broke up with my boyfriend of 7 years, and i started running cross-country & track in my senior year, and i started going to anime conventions with a girl i hardly knew, and i applied to Rutgers in my sophomore year of college, and i ran for student council president when i was 12, and i have taken half a dozen vacations i couldn't technically afford. and my life has been consistently awesome. everyone has shitty times and everyone has times where things are boring...but i am spurred on by the idea that my life can STAY awesome as long as i keep trying to keep it that way.
i am fine living my life this way. it's just really annoying to hear people use that same excuse from the article as a reason for their lives sucking and as a reason to tell me im being an idealist.