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Writer's pictureNABIL AHMED SIRAJ

The Problem is We Love Problems :)

I’ve been thinking about how hard we try to control our lives, “Fear and ego—in other words, ignorance—are keeping your hand on the tiller. Release the tiller for whatever reason, and the steering takes care of itself.” — Jed McKenna Think about it for a moment, why do we grip the tiller so hard ? (Tiller is the handle that steers the boat.) Imagine all your life is predetermined ,

Imagine that where you’re going to end up - the achievement of your goals, the attainment of your pursuits are predestined and you’re going there anyway, no matter how much you fear or worry.

You still need to work, you still need to do the things, but you don’t need to fear about completing the work or worry about whether you’ll do the things.

The things you need to do will get done, and the ones you don’t, won’t.

How differently would you experience life?

You’d be able to just BE.

In the world but not of the world.

Doing the things but not afraid of the things. “You observe events and you allow the flow of things to do the steering and you go where you go.”

— Jed McKenna “Release the tiller” is a mantra we all should be reminded of when we find ourselves gripping too hard to fears or expectations. But here is the problem : “We know that if we savour every moment—every smile, every meal, every ray of sunshine—we will be happy. Yet we savour maybe 1% of our moments.


We know that if we appreciate what we have, from the roof over our heads to the clothes on our backs, we will be happy. Yet we appreciate maybe 1% of what we have.

Good news makes us happier than bad news. Yet we consume way more bad news than good news, even though we can’t do anything about the bad news, and even though there is plenty of good news available.

Anger feels bad. Yet when we’re angry with our loved ones, we think about all the times they made us angry, which just makes us angrier. Why don’t we think about all the times they made us happy?


We can delude ourselves into believing pretty much anything: the earth is flat, the world is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles, etc. Yet we never delude ourselves into believing that everything is perfect and wonderful as it is.


If we were actually pursuing happiness, we’d be very good at it by now, given our many years of practice. Yet studies show that we suck at it. We’re incredibly bad at predicting how happy things will make us or how long our happiness will last.


There are vast bodies of scientific research that could help us stop sucking at happiness, like Positive Psychology, the science of happiness. Yet most people aren’t very interested in this research. It’s kind of boring.


We work too much, and some of us literally work ourselves to death, even though we’re well-aware that this makes us unhappy.

We constantly beat ourselves up, but we almost never give ourselves compliments.

We complain about Twitter, on Twitter.” — David Pinsof The truth is we all dream of happiness, it's just that we like the desire to dwell in our problem a lot more!

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