Live The Life YOU Want To Live: Part 1

Every day, most of us are bombarded by the expectations, fantasies, dreams, and hopes of the people around us and society.  We strive for these beliefs as if they are the things that will make us happy.  We follow these beliefs in hopes that it is for the best in the end.  We hope that they know what they are talking about when they say to follow a certain path to happiness.  But it isn’t.  In a way, those dreams, fantasies, hopes, and expectations are only just that.  Even the people who tell us the things they want for us may have never had those things.  So, in a way, it is a paradox.  People have dreams, fantasies, hopes, and expectations for us because that is what THEIR dreams, fantasies, hopes, and expectations are.  It doesn’t matter if it would truly make us happy or not because that is what they BELIEVE will make us happy.  And that’s where the confliction lays.  We BELIEVE that the hopes, dreams, fantasies, and expectations, of other people will make us happy as well.  But it isn’t always so.  We are so reliant on other people to tell us what they want in order to make them happy.  In a way, we are so hung up on trying to make THEM happy, that we forget to take care of our own happiness.  Sometimes, we forget to ask ourselves if this is truly what WE want, and not something that somebody else wants.  Sometimes we are so caught up in those ideas that we actually start to believe that those things are what we truly want.  Sometimes, we don’t even know what we want because we have been trying to live up to the ideas that other people have given us for so long. That is not to say that those people have bad intentions when they give us those ideas.  It is the opposite because they BELIEVE that what they want for us will be good for us.  So they do have good intentions but they have also been led to believe that what they are doing is good for us as well.  The only solution to all of this is to follow our own path to happiness.  Like opinions, each of us have our own idea of the life we want to live but there obstacles which impede us from living that life.  We are unique beings that have our own unique ideas of the life we want to live.  There is no one way for the path to happiness.  

So in what ways do people or society give us those ideas of happiness?  That's a question for another day...