The Suffering Gap
Our suffering is caused by the “Gap” between the Reality of our situation and the Expectation of our situation. The bigger the gap the more we suffer.
Understanding this gap is critical to our ability to live a life worth living.
Our expectations of what our life should be are constantly driven by the plethora of media coverage of “other peoples’ lives”. Instagram, Facebook, Print Media, Digital News…it comes at us at every second of the day.
From this we set an expectation of where we should be financially, emotionally, and in our career, at this time in our lives. The problem is we are unconsciously drilled from an early age that we must be better….but better than what?
Suffering…anxiety, depression, anger…come from the gap between what we expect our lives should be at a point in time, compared to where we actually are at in our lives. We wanted to have a certain amount of wealth at this stage, we wanted to have kids at this stage, we wanted to be travelling the world at this stage, the wants are endless. The reality of our situation at that point in time never seems to live up to our expectations, and the bigger that gap the more we suffer.
I’ve always been amused by the saying “Aim for the gutter and work up”, it seems the absolute opposite of what you should think when it comes to personal development. However if you expected at this point in time you would be homeless and living off welfare, but the reality is you rent a nice apartment and have a good solid job…then you are winning.
What this demonstrates is the difference between expectations and reality and how it makes us suffer.
Can you lower your expectations to meet your reality by accepting what is?
