Every but says something, but what does it say? It says that there are some exceptions from what’s before the but. If we think about life itself, is neither good nor bad. Life is a series of events. We are the ones labeling it so we are responsible for the goodness or the badness life has.
For example, a car accident is bad, but for life itself it’s just an accident. For you might be nothing whilst for the driver might be a bad thing (if that person is still alive). What I’m trying to say is that an event, by itself, doesn’t have a valence. The viewer creates it. So when someone says that life is good or life is bad, that’s how that person sees it.
I often say that life is tough. My life is tough from time to time as probably it is for most people, but that time is not the same. Maybe my life is good whilst your life is tough or maybe it’s the other way around. The thing is that regardless its valence, life needs to be lived and it will be by someone. Things happen even though we consider them bad, just as good things will happen regardless if we consider them good or not. It’s just a matter of perspective.
What pisses me off the most is that we often label random situations as good or bad without having the patience to watch the outcome. We expect for some bad things to happen even though they might not. Many times I’ve heard people saying that they expect for the worst so they can be prepared, but I think we can be prepared without necessarily expecting the worst. When we expect the worst, we already experience some negative feelings even though there is no real reason for that. We make that up and then we feel bad because of the situation we made up. But guess what? The negative emotion is not made up. That’s real! And it has real influence. And it can become a habit.
Let me ask you this: from all the situations that make you feel emotions like anger, sadness or depression, how often they are triggered by real situations and how often they are triggered from imaginary ones? I know that even our reality is different from one person to another, but with reality I mean things that happened, not that will happen. Let’s say we are somehow entitled to feel emotions like the ones above when something did happened, but not when nothing happened.
Life is good, but when it’s not good, is it mostly because something happened or because we think something bad will happen?