Life Isn't Complicated. I Make It Complicated.

There are a few things I enjoy doing when I drive alone. What I choose depends on how far I’m going and how I’m feeling. If I’m heading somewhere far away (30 minutes or more, say), I love listening to audiobooks. On shorter drives, if I’m feeling good, I listen to music from my high school days. If it’s a short drive and I’m not feeling great, I either focus on the road or call someone to get my mind off things. But if I’m not feeling great and the drive is long, I fixate on what’s bothering me and jump from one thought to the next.

That jumping from one thought to another sometimes turns into an argument with myself, and sometimes into gloomy monologues I can’t get out of. I revisit the past and ask myself, “What if things had gone differently? What would be different now?” I imagine the butterfly effects of the smallest changes, letting them grow in my mind. As the thoughts chase one another, I find myself falling down a rabbit hole and losing my way.

When I lose my way, the thoughts that gather in my mind can surprise me. Most of the time they make me sad, but sometimes they take me somewhere unexpected. The last time this happened, I began thinking about how complicated life is. The tangle of thoughts took me to a point where the thing that was bothering me, the thing making me unhappy, faded into the background. I asked myself, “Is life really complicated, or what is it that makes it feel that way?” Curiosity began to take the place of my unhappiness.

As I thought about life’s complexity, I realized that time doesn’t move at the same pace in every season of life. Most of us go through periods that show us how relative time is: a month can feel like a day, a year like a week. The reasons behind that can be positive or painful. The last two and a half years have been a difficult stretch in my life. Maybe I’m still going through it. But I don’t want to turn this piece into a long lament by sharing everything I’ve felt and been through in sorrowful prose. Rather than go into detail about what I’ve experienced, I want to share the thought I arrived at during that time.

During those difficult periods, when I was alone with my thoughts, I used to wonder why life was so complicated and why it made no sense for it to be this complicated. On my last drive, I returned to that question and eventually came to this answer:

Life isn’t complicated; I’m the one making it complicated. I’m surprised it took me so long to realize that. The question that helped me make sense of it is simple: Is my life really full of knots that need untangling, or am I making a few knots seem so big that I mistake the whole thread for one giant tangle?

But I can’t answer that by thinking only about my perspective; I also have to take into account the circumstances that have shaped my life. I come from the working class. So do my family, my close circle, and my extended family. Middle class, working class, wage earners, white-collar, blue-collar. Whatever label you use, our days are shaped by work and responsibilities.

When I run into a problem in the world of software, one line comes to mind: “We can’t be the first to run into this problem.” One day, I realized the same line might apply to life. There are at least 8 billion people in the world. Of course, everyone’s life is different, and everyone’s struggles are their own; still, my life is so ordinary that there must be plenty of people with problems like mine. Thinking about that comforts me in a strange way. I use the same line again, this time speaking to myself: “I can’t be the first person to face this problem.”

That thought comforted me at first. Then I realized how ordinary the conclusion I’d reached really was. I wasn’t the first person to say these things. What could I change in my life to make a positive difference? Maybe I should ask it this way: What is within my power to change? What can I really control? My life isn’t a piece of software that runs according to rules I’ve written. What I can change, though, are my thoughts and the way I see things.

I know I’ve been circling around the conclusion for the last three paragraphs. I think what I need to do is change how I look at things. It may not be easy, but the only things fully within my control are my thoughts, my perspective, and the tricks my mind plays on me. I can work on changing those with my own thoughts.

So far, so good. But how do I actually do it? That’s where I got stuck. In a way, that block was what brought me to the point I was trying to reach. Before getting out of the car, I went back over my monologue, summarized what I’d told myself, and jotted it down so I could remember it on the drive back.

By the time I started the drive back, nearly a whole day had passed. I no longer had the morning’s energy or the freshness of those thoughts. Everything that had happened during the day had pushed my morning thoughts aside; my priorities had shifted, and life had slipped into the background a little. Still, I kept thinking.

For example, what would make me happy? Being able to read whenever I want. Why can’t I do that? Because I have so many responsibilities. Why do they take up all my time? Because there’s too much work and too little time. But those aren’t the only problems. Like I said, I’m not the only one going through this. Working parents must deal with the same thing all the time, I’m sure. Are they as frustrated by it as I am? Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. But I’m sure some people going through the same thing complain less.

What’s different between these lives, then? Why do some people complain about this while others try to turn it to their advantage? It’s actually quite simple. I think it has to do with perspective. I need to change how I generally look at these situations. There’s an idea in my culture that I both love and dislike in equal measure: learning to be grateful for what you have. Being content with what I have. Making the most of what I have. Being grateful for what I’ve experienced.

That’s true, really. We need to know how to be grateful. And I think I need to learn how to turn what I have to my advantage. I should also get my priorities in life straight, I think. There’s a common lie that time is the only fair thing in life, that everyone gets 24 hours in a day. Yes, a day has 24 hours, but what you have to do in those hours, your obligations, vary from person to person. Take exercise, for example. It can be hard for someone who works eight hours a day.

A little calculation is in order. If I woke up at 6:00, started working out at 6:10, and finished at 7:00, then took a quick 15-minute shower, filled my travel mug with coffee, and headed to work… Sounds like a good plan, right? Except I wouldn’t even have time to say good morning to my family. So I’d need to get up earlier. If I woke up at 5:30 and spent half an hour with my family in the morning… Great, but getting up early means going to bed early. That’s fine; I’m not a night owl anymore. But after commuting to work and spending the whole day there, I’d still have chores to do when I got home, like making dinner, grocery shopping, or washing the dishes. All right, suppose I try to spend quality time with my family while doing some of those things. Let’s say dinner takes an hour. (I’m exaggerating, of course. What can’t you fit into 30 minutes?) After dinner, it’s already getting close to bedtime. I try to read a few pages and end up falling asleep.

Yes, life keeps moving along like this. Unfortunately, it’s hard to speak up about it. Even if resisting is within my power, does it make sense to turn it into a constant battle? Of course, working to change things is the most sensible option, but simply being angry about it isn’t enough.

I believe I’m heading in the right direction. I don’t plan to devote myself to the Dalai Lama’s philosophy, of course. Nor am I trying to be happy about everything as if I were living with Pollyanna. But there’s an English expression I really like: “It is what it is.” We’re a generation that talks about valuing time while spending three hours a day on our phones. So, it’s OK.

I know what I’ve written doesn’t hold together as a whole. Some parts don’t make sense. But I’m not trying to convey the secret of life to humanity in a short piece. I’m just trying to get some things off my chest. I hope no one reads all the way to the end, anyway. So I’ll stick to the general motto: It is OK. It’s okay to do what I need to do and what makes me happy.