Weekly Nugget of Wisdom #38

You will always have problems in life (and why this is not a bad thing)

Welcome to another Nugget of Wisdom! A free post I send out once a week. These are designed to be short and sweet, a quick read to (hopefully) impart some sort of wisdom, or at the very least to get you thinking about something interesting.

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You will always have problems in life (and why this is not a bad thing)

Mo Money, Mo Problems.

More money won’t solve your problems, but it’ll solve your money problems.

When you’re healthy, you have 100 problems. When you’re ill, you have one problem.

Have you heard these sayings before, or some variation of them? They’re pretty common, albeit perhaps a bit trite these days.

Speaking from personal experience though, there’s a lot of truth behind them.

I used to go through life thinking:

If only I could get X amount of money, everything would be good in life

If only I could stop drinking, everything would be good in life

If only I had a girlfriend / wife, everything would be good in life

Well, I stopped drinking, made more money than I ever dreamed I would make, got married, and guess what? I still have problems in life!

More money is great, but now I have new stresses that deal with tax and company structures and legal issues and while they might be better problems than some other money problems, they’re still problems (and they’re certainly not better than all money problems). They still cause stress and anxiety and require work to solve.

Quitting drinking has been lifechanging for me, but I used alcohol as a form of self medication and so while quitting drinking helped my overall health in a million ways, it also forced / forces me to deal with other life problems head on. It brings social anxiety to the surface a lot more for me. One big problem solved simply reveals other smaller problems to deal with.

Being married to the girl of my dreams is a dream come true, but is any marriage ever problem free? Being single had problems of loneliness and self-esteem issues and other doubts. Being married has relationship problems to deal with, cohabitation, shared finances, children, sex, and every other typical problem that people in relationships deal with.

All of this to say… if you are chasing X because you think it will solve all your problems, you are in for a rude awakening.

Does this mean not to chase X? Definitely not! X can be great! But just be aware that there is no magical fix that will make everything better in your life.

If you are an unhappy, bitter, and depressed person who is constantly stressed and overwhelmed dealing with whatever life throws at you and then you wake up tomorrow with millions of dollars in your bank account, you’ll very quickly find yourself an unhappy, bitter, and depressed person who is constantly stressed and overwhelmed dealing with life in slightly nicer surroundings.

Learning to accept that life is full of problems and that you have to learn to sit and live with that is the key to living a more fulfilled life. It’s basically learning to find the joy in suffering, to have a mind like water, and to be Stoic with a capital S.

I’ll leave you with this thought from Buddhism (closely related to Stoicism):

The Buddha said, “Everyone has 83 problems. Sometimes we fix one, but it is guaranteed that another will pop up in its place. It’s just life. I can’t help you with your 83 problems, but I can fix your 84th problem.”

“What is my 84th problem?”.

“Your 84th problem is that you don’t want to have any problems.”

Buddhism helps you with the 84th problem, which is suffering over the other 83 problems. If you can approach your other problems without the computational overhead of suffering over them, you can see them more clearly and act on them with more wisdom.

You’ll always have problems in life, but that’s not a bad thing. Having problems means you’re alive. It means you have the capacity to solve them. It means you have the capacity to find joy and contentment in them. There are people out there who would kill to have the problems you have (joke’s on them, really).

Having problems isn’t bad.

It’s life.

Thanks for reading! In case you missed it, check out Monday’s post below 👇