There is a trait that makes human beings special and superior to other beings, planning ahead. While most animals think about what they are going to eat today, we humans think about what and how we are going to eat tomorrow. Very few from other species do this, wolf packs plan formations to hunt, ants save food for winter in a warm place. Still, the level at which human beings think far ahead is startling when compared to others. This factor can single-handedly be attributed to all the progress we made together as a society and civilization.
Fast forward thousands of years, we are still carrying on that trait. The difference is that our plan does not just include food but happiness itself. We do everything we can today so that our future self is happy. At the end of the day the question is, now as you have become your future self, are you actually happy? The answer is mostly no.
Being happy has become difficult for us because our pursuit demands a huge sacrifice, the present. We constantly sacrifice our present to be happy in the future. We work hard and burn ourselves out so that our future self is happy. We work hard in our twenties so that our thirties self can be happy, we work hard in our thirties so that our forties self can be happy ,and so on.
At the end of our journey when we reach a point where we can’t run anymore, we realize or discover a tragic truth which we should have discovered a long time ago. In the pursuit of happiness, we did not only sacrifice our present but also our happiness along with it. I call this “Hustling your Happiness”. We hustle our happiness for a future self which is not even certain. Hustling is not something bad being mindful of the cost we pay for it is absolutely necessary.
Once I was searching for my pen for half an hour only for my mom to point out that it was in my pocket all along. As stupid as it sounds, little did I know that this stupid element is the answer to our quest for happiness. In our quest, we always believe that happiness is at the end of the line while it was with us all along, and we were just too naive to notice it.
“If you don’t want somebody to find something, put it right under their nose, they’ll never find it”, it works for happiness too. It’s hard for us to realize and accept that we need not work for decades to find happiness as it exists with us throughout our journey. The pleasure we derive from something positive should be experienced immediately to be consumed as happiness so that we can store it for our future self in the form of memory. If we ignore it now, our future selves will only have regret.
Associating happiness with our uncertain future self is the worst gamble that we can make in which we will always come out as losers. Hustling is just us trying to expand our comfort zone for our future self so that they can live and not survive, but hustling shouldn’t cost happiness.
