No One Asked You
So why did you choose to do it?
Every day we make roughly 35,000 choices. I would say often, if not always, we’re not aware that they’re choices. We think what we’re doing and how we’re doing it is just the way it is.
But it we sit back and think about it, that’s impossible. It’s impossible because the 7.8 billion people on the planet are not all doing the same thing the same way. If they were Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok would not be nearly as popular.
We get to choose what we do, how we do it, and when we do it. And we also get to choose to change whenever we want for any reason we want. Recognizing that level of freedom is either terrifying, liberating, or both.
We get to apply this choice towards our relationships. Do I choose to let my parent treat me poorly? Do I choose to make sacrifices for my partner? Do I choose to enable my child’s behavior?
All choices have consequences — and often the prospect of having a consequence that is unknown to us is enough of a deterrent to not allow ourselves to make the choices that best serve us.
We’d far prefer to be a martyr than happy. But why? Is happiness that bad? Did we do something in a previous life that made us not deserving of peace? Is our own inability to feel joy for someone else’s good fortune a reflection of our own inability…