Most people’s dissatisfactions with life are evergreen. Your weight, relationship, career, mental health, and family issues aren’t things you can fix once and never worry about again. They’re more like changing the oil in your car or taking out the trash. Kind of annoying but inseparable parts of the human experience. The rent we pay for being alive.

I’m not trying to be a nihilist here, I’m just pointing out we can’t wait for our problems to end. Life doesn’t have a finish line where the reward is an endless and refreshing cup of Happiness Juice ™. I thought you just had to slog away until you had checked enough boxes, then you could enjoy your life. I was wrong.

Those difficult feelings do not go away on their own, and most of them don’t go away at all, at least not completely. For the rest of your life, you will have some self-doubt. For the rest of your life, relationships will take effort and compromise. For the rest of your life, there will be positive changes you need to make that are out of your comfort zone. If pain will always be there, we can’t use it as a measure of our self-worth. That’s like a compass that points south no matter where you look.

Pain isn’t meant to tell you when you’re good enough, it just helps you stop doing something that hurts. Things change. The job that used to be amazing will stagnate. The love interest that seemed perfect at first might let you down when times get hard are needed. Or you might just have a really low day because you’ve been pushing yourself too hard for too long. These pains don’t mean you messed up. It’s just a smoke alarm going off to say “this isn’t working anymore, time to make a change.”

Understand what pain is so you can use it properly. Don’t blame yourself because old decisions don’t make sense anymore, but don’t ignore the pain either. Make the changes pain is telling you to make, and above all stop waiting for a day without pain to feel good enough. Self acceptance can’t wait until you run out of problems, that day will never come. 

Your entire life will be the emotional smorgasbord you feel today. Disappointment, frustration, inadequacy, insecurity, procrastination, resentment, excitement, amusement, optimism, dopamine, desire, and relief. Your experience is the human experience. Your conditions will change over time but your emotional spectrum will not. Pain is a part of that spectrum. Make peace with this color palette of experience. We all must accept it and learn to work with it, because the rest of our lives will be painted with these same colors. Stop waiting for better paint. It’s all any of us have.

Additional Resource: If this post resonated with you, I think you would benefit a lot from the Waking Up app by Sam Harris. It’s a meditation app that teaches you to notice your thoughts and recognize negative feedback loops, so you can exit them instead of being stuck for hours. We can’t choose to turn off pain or anxiety, but mindfulness helps us better manage the bad times and get more out of the good times. I think it could help you too.