Every Day.

[20cTomatoSauce]

What is happiness? What is most important to me? Freedom. Freedom to work if I choose. Freedom to sleep in or wake up early. Freedom to travel or stay at home. Freedom to associate with anyone or avoid everyone. What delivers this freedom? A fully owned home and $2M AUD. With that you can live off $60k income with no housing costs and appreciating underlying assets to keep up with inflation. Then there is no stress. I don't have to worry about working to survive. I can work at my leisure. Then there is no stress. If I fail at my work then it doesn't matter. I can still live off my passive income.

I was on the way to $1M by the time I was 30 but I stuffed it all up. Now i'm continuing to waste my time. So why waste my life slaving away. Every day. Every day. Never happy. Nothing changes. Always calculating the minutes until 5:00pm every day. every day. Nothing changes, saving every penny. It's like climbing a mountain with never ending faux peaks. Every minute outside my room it's like my chest is tightened up. I'm tensed the whole time. Once I get home and am alone I can finally breath again.

It's not as though I don't know what I should do to become "successful" or live a "normal life". I'm not stupid. Stop drinking so much. Exercise. Eat healthy. Go back to work. Work hard. Every Day. Every Day. Go out and socialize... The problem is. It's like you're asking a fish to fly. It can't fathom it, nor does it have the inclination to do so. I don't know how to be the person who wants to succeed every day. Every day.

If I had this inalienable drive that other people seem to have. Then this would be easy. I have the aptitude. I have the education/experience. I could work for 30 years. Get married have children. Live a happy life. There is nothing physically in between me and that reality other than time. The problem lies in the intangible. I cannot fathom being the person who can do all of that. The mere thought of spending a day working towards that makes me want to give up and cry... It's all too much. Then it's every day. every day.

How can an undisciplined person teach themselves discipline. How can they even have the drive to do so.

[Aaronsis]

Good Morning 20cTomatoSauce

Wow, what an insightful post, when I read your words alot of it rang true for me also. While I am not a professional, I am just a regular person who has just finished some work on her own mental health, this was an area for me that I spent some time trying to grapple with "what makes you happy?" "what is happiness".

So while I can see that financially you are secure, this is partly most people's drive in life I think, to be able to have enough money to have a house (rent or buy) and to be able to have food and basic comforts and sometimes a little left over for themselves, so this does take up alot of a persons day/week/life.

So what do you do when you can have some time to do your "happiness" and you have no idea what that is and what it looks like? As you mentioned, how do you "teach yourself discipline?"

Firstly I would like to suggest that seeing you have been so successful in securing a home and having the option not to work that you have drive, you have discipline that is infact inside of you already, with some support and some guidance you can reengage with this and rediscover it. To find out now about what drives you, what engages you, what excites you and what makes you "happy".

I also believe that we have this expectation that "happiness" has to be really large and wonderful things, I have recently learnt this not to be the case. Small things can really make a huge impact to our mental wellbeing, to our way of thinking and feeling and creating a path to "happiness".

So..the million dollar question..how do we find "happiness"....in my opinion it is a journey that we go on every day, to try new things, to talk to new people, to learn new skills, to engage with nature....even smaller things like taking a moment to sit quietly and breathe, or to have that piece of chocolate and really enjoy it...but to try things and to make choices we may not usually do, to find out how we feel about these things and to search for happiness.

I also have found the help of a therapist so very very useful and she really has helped me on my way to finding what makes me happy, what makes me smile and what ignites feelings of joy in me. Maybe this could work for you too?

I hope to chat to you some more.

Huge hugs to you

Sarah