Hello friends,
How are you?
I’ve had to change the schedule a bit, that’s how come you’re seeing so many articles coming in one after the other. You can keep expecting three articles a week and an update on the news page once a week.
This topic has come to me while I was doing Zumba today, see a famous young singer’s song came on and while I was doing Zumba it crossed my mind about how a lot of people that reach celebrity status quickly at such a young age get struck with mental illness because of the steep highs and quick-paced life that comes with some jobs where the threat lies in being replaced from one day to the next. This fazes a lot of celebrities. This idea that opportunity might not strike again, and this good so you got to grab it from one opportunity to the next and before you know it, you’re on an emotional, mental, spiritual, physical ride/rollercoaster.
At first, you think you can handle it all; the pressure, deadlines, going from here to there, managing and keeping control of your personal life and all the compartments you’ve made in your life is under strict control but the question is how long will you be able to control it, how long till it overloads, and how long left for it to explode? The younger generations require instant gratification. The thing is this is life, and not always in real life when you’re out in the real world can you continue living with instant gratification.
Let me put it to you by using examples.
When you’re young everything is possible and what I’ve observed in first world countries was the boom when the EU was formed young adults and other generations could afford to travel more and freely. Till this day young adults in first world countries mostly can afford to travel and practically spend a couple of years doing this by working in some job saving money just to go travelling and then return, get another job and then head off again. The thing that comes with spontaneity, instant gratification, fearlessness, adventure are things like adrenaline, wanting to experience that feeling more and more and the truth is that as much as you get to live these incredible opportunities in your youth or even at a later stage in life there comes a time when this dies down in the sense that life comes in the way and pushes you in the direction of looking at other things which you’ve never looked at or wanted before. This may mean settling down, this may come as a wake-up call; someone fell ill, and you’ve just happened to get a reality check about what really matters in life; prioritising.
When you’ve lived life on a constant high (and especially far from the reality of most youths your age) the lows can be seriously hard to swallow especially if your life has changed drastically through your choices or circumstances. The best way is to keep the balance and still take all the areas of your life onto the next level together not leaving a of couple areas of your life behind. True success takes time, work, patience, effort, education, learnings, mistakes, testing, taking two steps back to take a look at things in order to get five steps ahead at a time, and this can be an endless list because success is made up of all sorts of divine meetings too that you have no clue are coming your way. No recipe to success but to begin it requires trial, error, hard work, belief, knowing what you really want and feel good doing. No instant gratification, no instant results, nothing is instant about true success.
This is why when success hits young people at a young age who don’t know better in a world where very few privileged people get to experience it’s because of its exclusivity it becomes an obsession to keep the spot because it’s seen to be exclusive and highly rated.
Imagine if your life was designed so that you can keep having all your needs met all the time? Imagine if half of those needs were never even earned one hundred percent through your own hard work?
Can you feel the value in having them? Can you really appreciate them?
The thing is, as we get more we want more, the more we get we increase the level of satisfaction, but what happens when you have exhausted it and lived most of it up, lived the most incredible things to get down to living less because your journey in life is different, your flesh is hanging, your hair is falling, your eyes are sagging or your experience has forcefully come to an end to follow a different course?
When we get so attached to instant gratification and don’t accept that the journey has changed and that your evolution is somewhere else you fall into a deep depression. No one can fix it, not having a partner, or wondering maybe if I have this then the depression will go or if I have that then the depression will go. It’s a process that your emotions are going through but it requires your participation and sobriety to understand it and walk yourself through it to the other side where you begin to live a realistic beat moving bricks, removing some placing them somewhere else so the foundations can be set for true success where you process what you need to process along the journey to success; the good, bad and the ugly.
I see depression as a “deep rest” from intense happenings; the good, bad and the ugly. I don’t necessarily believe that everything that is diagnosed should be treated medically. The is a natural human feeling, body reaction and the body finds a way to treat itself. Sometimes rest/deep rest is needed (emotional rest, mental rest, physical rest) from deep stuff which could take a few years for you to be in a better state so that you can take all that you’ve uncovered from it in a forward direction in your life.
See there was a time in my life where I needed the mindset to get moving while I was travelling in Spain finding my direction. The person said this sentence that stuck with me, it helped me get moving, and stayed with me for years after that. He said, “Patel, life isn’t the way it should be, life is the way it is.” After applying this statement to my life things began to go well for me, I just went for it, grabbed the next opportunity from where the reality currently stood for me which then led me to other adventures after that. This statement for me was the key, it pulled me out of the other once incredible life into reality; I was no longer the incredible English speaking boss, I was starting from zero because I was still learning how to talk, yes, talk Spanish. This is what real people are made of, see those people who are still up there in the success ladder, see those people who have come so far, see those people who people have judged as snobbish, see those people who you’re judging that have had zillions of things going on or gone on with them that you don’t even know… so see … success isn’t for the faint-hearted.
The lows can be incredibly low if you don’t get a right handle on it. You have to hack switching it. Using a life hack of some sort so that you can switch to the right thing/thought which is appropriate for you so that you can keep moving forward. Know one thing, you are where you’re exactly supposed to be. This very moment you’re supposed to be there because I believe that everything happens for a reason, everything is meant to be exactly how it’s panning out to be.
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by either purchasing one of my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
The audiobook for The South African: True Colours is available on iTunes, Apple and Audible. The South African: Roamer and Light will be released soon.
Note: Do keep referring back to this site as much as possible, as I grow, a more profound perspective may form and so I will always come back to each of these articles to reevaluate them.
