@Malkynn How did you get to the point of consciously changing your perception?
I am very much struggling with wishing for things in the future and not able to enjoy day to day life as much but can't seem to change.
It's just about making it a top priority.
The problem is that most people don't understand priorities.
Most people think making something a priority means cramming into their existing life by willpower or force.
Like exercise, most people try to willpower themselves to exercise after work, on top of everything else they are already trying to accomplish. It doesn't work because they're not actually prioritizing it over anything else, they're trying to allot extra resources to it that they don't have.
Making something a priority means putting it first and adjusting your *entire life* around it and allotting your resources accordingly.
I now believe that if you aren't happy with your present, you had better have a damn good reason for it: finishing med school, battling cancer, bouncing back from a major business failure, going through a divorce, etc, etc.
Y'know, shit that really throws you for a loop and can take several years to manage.
If you are relatively able bodied, remotely intelligent, and have even a smidge of discipline, you should be able to generate a fulfilling life.
If you aren't...maybe you need to re-evaluate not just your plan, but also your priorities.
If your plan is based solely on the priority of making your future self happy, then you have a glaringly obvious culprit as to why you aren't happy in the present.
You CHOSE not to be. You chose a life and balance of priorities that puts future you ahead of present you.
The biggest problem with choosing future happiness over current happiness is that the more you do it, the more you train yourself to only consider your future self.
You train yourself to devalue your current happiness, which isn't healthy. If you do it long enough, it becomes very hard to stop.
When is enough? When is future-you allowed to be now-you?
It will ALWAYS seem more beneficial to prioritize future-you. It will always seem wiser, more mature, admirable, advisable, and praise-worthy.
Except it's not. In fact, it's pretty fucking pathological actually.
Delayed gratification is wise compared to self-destructive self-indulgence, but that's VERY different from prioritizing present happiness, and that's the part that most people get confused about. We're taught as kids the value of not giving into our short term drives, only NO ONE teaches us about how hard it is to be happy.
People assume happiness is a passive state that occurs when there's an absence of barriers to said happiness.
"I'll be happy when I graduate", "I'll be happy when I have FU money", "I'll be happy when I retire", "I'll be happy when I lose the weight", "I'll be happy when my kid gets into college and I no longer have to worry about all of these extra curriculars", etc, etc.
Happiness is like physical fitness, it takes work every day to maintain it. An obese person who loses weight isn't suddenly fit. They're not obese anymore, which is great, but they still need to exercise in order to get fit.
Happiness is the same. You can remove barriers to make it a lot easier to be happy, but you still have to put in the daily work and make it a daily priority.
So again, if happiness *today* isn't your priority, then how on earth do you expect to be happy in the future? And when exactly will it be appropriate to start working on it?
Your life will never be perfect, you will always have stressed and obligations and retirement won't fix that for you. A certain net worth won't fix that for you.
So you feel like you want to focus on happiness today but you "can't". Well, of course you can't, your priorities and plans probably don't align at all with generating present happiness.
Look carefully at your life choices and your priorities. I bet most of them are future-focused and by design they put your current happiness on the back burner. And don't forget, that that's a choice that you made for yourself.
If you want it to be different, you have ALL of the power to decide to have different priorities. But understand what that means. Understand that that means completely rearranging your entire life around a new priority, not just really wishing things were different and continuing on in the exact same pattern you always have.
The craziest thing about prioritizing present happiness is that it often correlates with higher future happiness as well. People like me and MMM himself have learned though experience that amazing doors open up when you focus on living your best life.
I chose to significantly cut back in my career in order to focus on mental health and happiness, and a few years later, my career has exploded in ways I could never have imagined, because I've focused only on projects that I enjoy and ferociously defended myself against work I don't enjoy.
As a result, my future self actually has a much cushier life than what was initially planned back when my future self was my top priority.
My last note on this very long essay of a post is that focusing on my present happiness has made me much more insightful as to what my future self might actually want.
It's shocking to realize that if you aren't already happy, it's extremely difficult to anticipate what a happy future-you really cares about. It's been eye opening getting to know my happy self and alarming to find that her priorities are WAY OFF what I thought they were back when I was unhappy.
ETA: sorry for the length, I've had way too much coffee this morning, lol
