Life's Biggest Lessons

There's nothing worse than a sleepless night.

We've all been there, tossing and turning. You focus all your mental power on trying to fall asleep. With all your will, you force yourself to shut your eyes, turn your brain off, and pray to be whisked away into sweet slumber.

Ten, twenty, thirty minutes go by, and you're still there, eyes closed yet still unable to fall asleep. Despite counting sheep and doing a full head-to-toe full body relaxation, you're more awake than ever, staring up at the ceiling.

So you cut your losses and decide to get up. You turn on the TV, do a crossword puzzle, or read a few chapters of a book. Your mind is occupied, guessing the plot twist of your mystery novel or trying to come up with the capital of Nepal. Your eyelids grow heavy, and your head bobs. Your book falls face down on your chest.

The TV continues to drone on in the background, and suddenly you're fast asleep.

This is the backwards law, which states that the more we try to pursue something, the less likely we will succeed. In the case of a restless night, the more you think about your desire to fall asleep, the less likely you are to fall asleep.

And when your mind is elsewhere, not directly striving to achieve your intended goal, that is when you finally get some rest.

And it's funny how this works because it seems paradoxical. Why do our wants come directly to us when we give up and let go?

Alan Watts was an English-born pop philosopher who is widely attributed to the backwards law, but Watts didn't invent the phenomenon; neither was he the first to recognize it. In fact, he got the idea from Zen Buddhism. For Buddhists, desire and ignorance are at the heart of all worldly suffering. By eliminating this desire, you will no longer search for what you lack because you will be satisfied and at peace with your life.

Watts molded the Zen Buddhist perspective into the backwards law. It's called backwards because it seems counterintuitive. In the West, we have a unique relationship with effort. Psychologist Mark Manson labels our ideas about effort as an example of linear thinking.

Picture effort represented on the x-axis of a graph with the intended results on the y-axis. The more effort we put into a given task, say learning the guitar, the better our results will be. And for some things, this is true. If you practice every day, at some point, although it might be far in the future, you could theoretically play "Stairway to Heaven," widely regarded as the most challenging song to play on the guitar.

In cases like these, the backwards law doesn't apply. It's not a magic trick that allows you to improve at a task that requires sustained effort and diligence to achieve results.

This linear conception of effort and reward is etched into our brains. We usually only exert ourselves when there's a promised benefit. If your guitar experience is full of bleeding fingers and broken strings without marked progress, you will soon put the instrument down for good.

The belief that each time you practice you will improve is what pushes you through the pain and setbacks. The linear relationship between effort and reward motivates us to do complex tasks, and fundamentally, we believe our hard work deserves to be rewarded.

It's not a flawed belief to have; it allows us to make goals, strive to achieve them, and feel proud when we reflect on how far we've come. The problem is that we've become so used to this "effort equals result" that we expect it in every area of our lives, even in situations where it's not applicable.

This way of thinking is only valid when assessing quantifiable tasks. For example, the more time you spend making bracelets, the more you make. The more cardio you do, the more endurance you build up because these results are measurable. We can see a direct correlation between our hard work and the outcome, but that's just not how life works.

Often, our best efforts do not yield the desired results. You can do all the right things in a relationship, and your partner will still walk away. You can spend extra hours studying for a test and still fail. Sure, the effort might increase your chances of success, but you will be wrong to falsely interpret that as a guarantee.

As much as we like them to, effort and success don't necessitate one another, especially regarding psychological matters. When you try and be happy, you only notice how miserable you are. Striving for freedom makes you feel more constrained, and yearning to love and be loved leaves you heartbroken and lonely.

When a pursuit is strictly psychological, your effort has an inverse relationship with your wanted rewards. The more you try to achieve happiness, confidence, love, freedom, security, or any other psychological need, the further you are from that goal.

And to make matters worse, there are no instructions for meeting those psychological needs. Centuries of philosophers have toiled and struggled to define the more ephemeral aspects of life, like freedom or happiness. What makes you assume you have the tools to achieve these elusive and mysterious parts of the human experience?

When you apply a linear effort equals reward approach, you're bound to be disappointed because it's impossible to quantify the reward. How do you know the exact effort needed to achieve an unknown result? Moreover, your intense focus on your perceived deficiencies makes them seem more prevalent.

The moment you start questioning your happiness is the moment you realize you're unhappy. And while self-reflecting, we tend to skew towards a negative bias of ourselves. Why? That would constitute a whole other video.

But our negative self-conception, combined with the impossibility of achieving abstract states of being like love or happiness mixed with a linear approach to effort and reward, is the ultimate recipe for misery. No wonder your search leads farther and farther away from your intended goal.

You're trying to do what is supposed to lead to the ultimate happiness. You eat healthily, work out, set boundaries, volunteer, and spend time with family and friends, yet you remain discontent. There must be something wrong with you because all your efforts to be satisfied with your life leave you miserable.

The constant confrontation of what you lack reminds you that you will never be happy, despite your best efforts. You can lead yourself to a dark place when the expectations of your life don't align with reality.

Backwards thinking tells us to stop trying to achieve what we want. It tells us to fight against the urge to control our emotional lives through constant tweaking and striving. The problem is that this goes against what we're taught by most self-help gurus today.

We're told that we're in complete control of our happiness, in the driver's seat of our lives, and have total control over how we live it. And I've even said these things before, and so we try to micromanage our every impulse and desire. We try to exert complete control over our emotional well-being.

We want to feel whole, but all our best efforts only leave us feeling empty. In the words of Mark Manson, "Desiring a positive experience is itself a negative experience. Accepting a negative experience is itself a positive experience."

This might not seem very natural, but it is the truth. The counterintuitive nature of the backwards law philosophy prevents people from trying it. It's also possible that the theory could spiral in on itself until it becomes completely useless, and focusing on ridding yourself of any desire to be happy becomes a new desire—the desire to remove desire.

But Alan Watts has a solution to mastering the backwards law. You must remember that you are at the root of all of your desires. You must recognize that you already have all you could want just by desiring it in the first place. So it's futile to attempt removing or supplanting your wants.

Watts once said, "A knife doesn't cut itself, and fire doesn't burn itself, and a light doesn't illuminate itself." While this sounds obtuse and heady, it's pretty simple.

Think about the person who strives for happiness. They pay close attention to the variables that make them feel content and enact those daily, from eating well to socializing and everything in between. They have built a life they enjoy.

So why do they still question themselves? Aren't they just plain and simply happy? That is Alan's point. If you desire happiness and do what should bring you joy, then there is no need to question yourself. You are happy.

Questioning or putting too much pressure on yourself to achieve an arbitrary ideal will only draw attention to a lack that might not even be there. Your actions reflect your desires, and in contemplating them, you will fulfill those desires.

The problem occurs when you focus too much on trying because you will always fail, leaving you feeling discouraged. The goal is to just be.

Stop trying to be confident—just be confident. Be happy. Be secure. Asking yourself or others how to become or achieve what you want to be is a mistake. Let the question go, let the effort go, and just be.

We spend too much of our short lives in a futile battle to satisfy what we lack. The consistent focus on lack can be crushing and obscure the abundance around us.

The search for what we lack conceals us from what we already have. It's deeply ironic to spend your whole life seeking something that was in front of you all along. All you had to do was let go of the search and the desire. Continue to live your life and stop looking for something you'll never find and realize you already have it.

To harness the power of the backwards law, live your life to the best of your ability. The backwards law doesn't work when you engage in self-destructive behavior. It's not about doing the opposite of what you want or thinking you don't deserve to live a fulfilling life.

It's about living in a neutral state. To live this way, you are not regressing backwards to a place of self-pity and torment, nor are you reaching forwards to an ideal life you'll never grasp. You must honor that in your life which makes you comfortable and content.

Focus on your instincts. Be yourself. And you must be present with what you have and not ask for more.

It may be easier than it sounds. You could discover that you've been living life the way you've wanted for yourself all along. Because the primary key to the backwards law isn't the overthinking the state of your life. It's about continuing to live it, regardless of its condition.

You must relinquish control and realize you can never find freedom, happiness, and love through trying. So stop looking because you've always had all you will ever need. You were just too busy searching to realize.

If you need help quieting your mind so you can finally see the beauty around you, this video on meditation will help.

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Back to our story. What if I told you that you're an addict and you don't even know it?

Don't worry, you're not alone. We all are, or most of us, at least. And here's a little experiment to prove it.

Once this video ends, turn off your phone and leave it in a drawer for the next 24 hours. Do you think you can survive without it? If you're willing to give it a try, you're already among the few people courageous enough to do so. That sadly doesn't mean it'll be easy.

In the first few hours, you might experience a feeling of emptiness or anxiety. You might feel your phone vibrating in your empty pocket. You might involuntarily reach for it while you're waiting on the bus or for an elevator. As your day progresses, though, a sense of freedom should wash over you.

You'll all of a sudden be witnessing the world through new lenses, so to speak. You'll start noticing things you haven't in a while, and your brain will be more active than it ever can be while mindlessly scrolling through social media.

When the 24 hours are over, you would have gained a new perspective on your relationship with your phone, and you might even become more aware of how much time you spend using it. But if we're being completely honest, chances are you'll be back to your old habits before you know it, because like I said, you're an addict. We all are.

But our phones aren't the problem; our brains are. There's a thin line between pleasure and pain, and you've probably heard this before, but even if you haven't, your brain knows this very well. At our core, we're hardwired to seek pleasure and avoid pain, which makes the two linked—so much so that the part of the brain that controls these two very contrasting emotions is one and the same.

In our early days as a species, differentiating between the two was often the difference between life and death. With scarce resources, our survival depended on being able to distinguish between the pleasure of having a full stomach and warm shelter from the pain of starvation and the elements.

Fortunately, times have drastically changed since then. We're now living in an era of overabundance. Ideally speaking, this should make us happier, right? Sadly, the data shows that we're actually less and less happy. Depression levels have spiked in the last 30 years, and people in high-income countries have become less satisfied with their lives in the past decade, even though we're arguably living in humanity's golden age.

It turns out that the reason we're unhappy is because of this very overabundance. We become addicted to the feel-good drug that our brain naturally releases: dopamine.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter released in our brain whenever we're anticipating a reward. You can say it's arguably the most important neurotransmitter because it's responsible for our experience of motivation, pleasure, and reward.

Going back to the thin line between pleasure and pain that we talked about earlier, the truth is it's more of a seesaw and not a line. Your brain is constantly working to remain in a state of equilibrium called homeostasis—the balance between pleasure and pain.

So let's say you're scrolling through social media, and you experience something pleasurable, like a cute cat video on your feed. Your brain will immediately recognize that as a pleasurable experience and release dopamine, which will tilt the seesaw towards the pleasure side.

Then the balancing act begins, and your brain immediately tilts the seesaw back in an equal and opposite amount to the pain side in order to restore homeostasis. This is when you start feeling restless, anxious, and unhappy. Instead of sitting with this emotion until that balance is restored, you decide to indulge in more cat videos to get another dose of dopamine.

And this is where dopamine can become a double-edged sword. Because just like any drug, the more your brain releases it, the less its effect, and the more you're craving.

Today, we have endless ways of getting that quick fix of pleasure. Almost every second of our day offers an opportunity to be stimulated, whether it's sugar and junk food, social media, or porn. The response in our brain is the same—a dopamine hit that brings about pleasure, only to be quickly followed by a balancing dose of pain or the come down.

This is when our brain, in its constant effort to maintain our chemical balance, counters the massive surge of dopamine with massive drops that can lead to a lack of motivation, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and even depression.

And just like drug addiction, when we're repeatedly exposed to pleasure-producing stimuli, our brains develop tolerance, and then we need more and more of the drug just to tip the seesaw back and feel normal again. So we spend more and more time on our phones or indulging in junk food just to end the craving, even though it's not bringing us the same amount of pleasure anymore.

The truth is our brains aren't equipped to deal with this overload of dopamine that is so easily accessible today. Our brains really haven't evolved much through the centuries, but our access to pleasurable experiences has skyrocketed, which has caused us to build somewhat of an obsession with instant gratification.

According to Dr. Anna Lembke, the chief of Stanford University's dual diagnosis addiction clinic, the problem is that we're losing our ability to delay gratification, solve problems, and deal with frustration. Our obsession with receiving constant pleasure stimuli means we now have less tolerance to pain stimuli, like anxiety, stress, and restlessness.

Our brains are literally becoming less equipped to deal with negative emotions. This is why when you can't reach for your phone, you feel anxious, or why going for a walk feels like a waste of time when you could be playing video games on the couch.

Instead of processing our negative emotions and dealing with them in a healthy way, we've resorted to simply taking another hit of our naturally released feel-good drug. But as dark as this may seem, there is a silver lining.

Natural dopamine release in our brains is about ten times less than the surge of dopamine triggered by the use of most hard drugs. Having sex, for example, releases about 200 units of dopamine, while meth can release more than six times that amount.

This is why a natural dopamine addiction is much easier to fix than an addiction to alcohol or drugs, even though the process is fairly similar.

So how do you cure your dopamine addiction? Well, the first thing you should do is stop.

Stop scrolling through social media, or watching porn, or eating junk food, or seeking any form of instant gratification. Set a target for yourself, like a 30-day break from your crutch.

Don't worry, unlike with any drug addiction, you won't be abstaining forever, but this initial period is essential to rewire your brain and balance your pleasure-pain seesaw. This is what they call a dopamine detox, a form of cognitive behavioral therapy developed by Dr. Cameron Seitz.

Its name could be misleading because you can't actually stop your brain from releasing dopamine, but abstaining from the constant blast of pleasure stimuli can help you identify unhealthy patterns and replace them with healthy ones.

Once you achieve this, you may then introduce those activities back into your life, but this time in moderation. A warning though: during your time of abstinence, you might feel anxious, irritable, or even empty. But you should embrace it.

The idea is to delay gratification for as long as possible and get comfortable with being uncomfortable. As paradoxical as it may seem, you may actually seek out pain instead of pleasure. It's a stoic approach meant to make us appreciate all that we are blessed with in life.

So go for a long run, a cold shower, or maybe even read about philosophy and how challenging yourself can lead to a more disciplined and satisfied life. When we do challenging things, it has the opposite effect that instant gratification has on our brains.

Instead of getting a dopamine boost beforehand, our brain releases it after we've successfully completed our challenge. And this earned high is sweeter, more satisfying, and more long-lasting than instant gratification.

This may seem like a lot of hard work that requires a lot of conscious effort, but that's the whole point: conscious effort. A big reason for our dopamine addiction is that we unconsciously seek out pleasure-seeking stimuli because they're so easily available.

How many times have you grabbed your phone without even realizing it and found yourself scrolling through social media? How many hours have you spent scouring through Netflix late at night when all you really wanted to do was just go to bed?

If we're going to reset our brain's dopamine levels, we have to actively work to make that happen.

At the end of the day, it's only natural to pursue enjoyment, but the kind of world we're living in today has created an expectation that we can always be happy. But the truth is that we can't, and that should be fine. Seeking out pleasurable stimuli is good; it's the obsessive and elusive pursuit of happiness that is the real problem.

So let's go back to our phone experiment from the beginning. Whether you've decided to do it or not, its purpose wasn't really to show you that you're a dopamine addict but to help you gain some perspective on how your phone is affecting your life.

This little device has a gateway to countless amounts of fun that you could enjoy with just a swipe or two, and it almost feels silly not to. But as with all things in life, there are consequences.

We've forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts, how to concentrate on the flow of our lives without any interruptions, and how to focus on what's really important. The truth is this overabundant world we live in today means that almost all of us are addicted to something.

So whatever dopamine addiction you think you have, do you think you can cut it off for long periods of time, like a day or even a month? Can you deny your natural programming, delay gratification, and seek pain instead of pleasure?

You can find out the answer to this question in a couple of seconds when this video ends and you're left with a simple choice: watch another video, eat another cookie, or play another video game.

Give in to the dopamine craving that you know no longer satisfies you, or you can fight the urge and go for a walk, take a cold shower, or maybe even just be for a minute or two without any sort of stimulation.

You now know that it's crucial for your mental seesaw, your peace of mind, and ultimately your happiness.

My life completely changed in my final year of college after spending the first three years as an introvert who only really went to school to get the best grades.

I started communicating more with my professors and other students in my program. I started making friends, going out more, and allowing myself to enjoy the other non-academic activities. Reaching out and being more social paid off in a variety of ways, but by then, it was too little too late.

My academic life was pretty much over. I started thinking about what could have been had I been more social sooner. What I didn't learn in university or college from classes was that connecting with people was critical to success.

I learned that from my experience outside the classroom. You can call it what you like—networking, making human connections, socializations—whatever you choose to describe it. Know that it will propel you forward.

We tend to think the world is more of a meritocracy than it is. Yes, skill and education do play a role in where you end up, but a lot of the professional world is who you know or who you get to know.

Someone is able to put a face to a bio or a resume; it has a big impact. These are just some of the most important life lessons that college didn't teach you.

We're often taught what we should learn, but not how we should learn. The truth is the reason many people suffer in school is that they haven't figured out the best way to learn for themselves, so they conclude that they're bad learners and don't absorb information well.

When in reality, they just need to try a different technique. After struggling sometimes in school, I turned things around by doing two key things: making physical notes and repetition.

During classes, I wrote out notes on a physical notepad. I stayed focused on lectures this way and could better recall what I had learned. In preparation for exams, I wrote out a new set of notes to study and reviewed those notes every day for four to five days in a row.

During exams, I had no trouble recalling what I'd studied, and the whole learning process stopped being any kind of stressful. Just 24 hours after reviewing a subject, we forget about 20% of what we've been studying, but by repeating the review process, our memory improves to the point where we can basically remember almost everything we've learned.

But before we can start learning anything, we have to first be open to learning itself. Our desire to learn is something we actually have some control over. A study by Nicole Dling, a psychologist at the University of Utah, showed that by focusing on positive learning outcomes over challenges, we can motivate ourselves into starting the learning process.

When we envision that brighter future, we're more likely to take concrete steps to make it a reality. One of the problems with our education system is that it doesn't teach us how to use tools to get things done when in reality, that's one of the things that makes us uniquely human.

In just a few years, we've gone from teachers saying we won't always have a calculator in our pockets to having full-fledged computers in our pockets. Whether you're trying to have a conversation with a potential partner, trying to write a New York Times bestseller, or just making a YouTube video, being as detailed as possible is super important.

Abstract language doesn't excite the imagination. When you want to give someone a compliment, it's better to say, "That dress really compliments your beautiful eyes," than to say, "You're pretty."

No one really feels anything from these general descriptions. When trying to have a conversation, go into as much detail as you can. That's how you keep a conversation going.

If somebody asked you how a party was, don't just say it was no good. Instead, say stuff like the loud music hurt your ears and the sink overflowed because somebody dropped their keys down the drain.

It gives the person you're talking to more to imagine and offers insight into who you are. The most frustrating trend in conversation is abrupt two-word answers. They give the other person nothing to work with.

When you're writing, telling a story, or even simply giving somebody instructions, going into as much detail as time would allow might be the difference between getting a second date and your younger sibling burning down the house because they set the oven to Celsius and not degrees Fahrenheit.

When we need help, we often feel anxious, and that anxiety prevents us from getting help. It tells us there's not enough time, and it threatens to intensify if we take a break from our day-to-day.

But if we really do take a step back, we'll realize that help will improve everything. It'll calm our anxiety and will probably speed up whatever we're doing. Help brings clarity or at least puts us on a better path.

This is true for the smaller things in life, like our temporary projects, and the bigger things, like mental health problems. One of the main things keeping us from getting help is the notion of self-reliance.

We think we should be able to overcome our problems on our own. The idea of asking for outside help can feel embarrassing or shameful, but of course, it's not. The best of us ask for help and are better for it.

When you feel uncertainty in your mind, don't hesitate to ask questions. Clarity may come from your own independent exploration, but it will certainly come a lot quicker by asking another human being for answers or solutions.

And there's another big benefit from asking questions: you build stronger relationships. It shows you care and keeps people engaged.

You know that good feeling you get when somebody asks you a question, and you're able to give them the solution to their problems? Yeah, most of us have that too.

So by asking questions, you give people the opportunity to feel good about finding a solution for you. Most of us have an image of a status-obsessed person in our minds.

They keep a pristine house and buy fancy cars to impress their neighbors, but status is often more subtly ingrained in the way we think of others and ourselves—so ingrained that we often don't notice it.

Try this thought experiment: imagine someone you're in a relationship with leaves you for somebody else. Now imagine people of all different income levels becoming your ex's new lover.

Do some make you feel differently than others? Does the rich person fill you with resentment? How about the person who doesn't have a stable income?

Think about someone in your field that you don't think is as skilled as you. Have you assigned them a different status in your mind? Probably, and it probably affects your interactions with them, whether you like to admit it or not.

But status isn't real. Our status in our occupation is just a social game that doesn't even extend beyond our work. You're just a face, name, and number to the government worker renewing your license, not whatever role you play at your job.

The more we remember the fictitious nature of status, the more we'll respect others and treat them fairly.

Let's say you notice a new offer in your personal inbox while online banking. It's a special offer from a credit card company, and they're going to give you 0% interest for six months. It sounds great. You can borrow money for free for half a year.

Most of you are probably suspicious of this offer already. Banks make offers like this not to save you money, but to squeeze more money out of you in the long run.

They know that most people will charge a lot of money on their card, feeling safe with that 0% interest, and by the time the standard interest rate sets in, they've accumulated way too much debt to pay back.

Credit card holders are now being charged interest and increasing their debt at an alarming rate, and banks make money off debt. It's their main source of revenue.

With a profit-driven mindset, they prey on the financially illiterate and those with bad spending habits. Take on debt carefully and be aware of predatory banking; they are not your friend.

We have a tendency to compare ourselves to others. We use them as a measuring stick for our own success, and when we're not thinking of specific people, we're appealing to specific markers as a measure of success.

But all these standards aren't real. These markers and goals can be helpful in making us feel more successful, but we should always step back and recognize that they're not actually important in the grand scheme of things.

All that matters is being better than who we were yesterday. I should clarify that you don't necessarily have to have everything you need to be happy. Your basic needs should be met first, and some of us are stricken with debilitating conditions that can have a tremendous impact on happiness.

But provided these needs and conditions are covered, you can pursue happiness at any point in your life. What better place to focus your efforts than contentment?

Most of the things we pursue in life are means to an end. Our careers, money, and entertainment are all means to find happiness in some way, so why not pursue more lasting happiness directly?

Why not make it our main goal in life? One of the oddest things we do is put off enjoying the moment. We panic and tell ourselves that we should be planning for the future, and then when that future comes, we can finally enjoy the moment.

But as the philosophical author Alan Watts famously insisted, that future never comes. When the future does arrive, you'll be planning for another future, and you'll never be satisfied with the moment.

Let yourself enjoy the present. Quiet the voice telling you to anticipate the future every time you're out enjoying time with friends or just sitting doing nothing at all—and I mean literally nothing.

Let your mind wander. Be okay with not looking at your phone or being busy.

Mahatma Gandhi insisted on the use of nonviolent resistance in his efforts to help free India from British colonial rule. He strongly believed that violence only encouraged more violence; it could never lead to a desired state of peace.

While it's important to acknowledge that violent resistance did play a part in India's liberation, Gandhi's non-violent approach played a big role and continues to inspire the world to this day.

But for Gandhi, violence doesn't just mean physical violence; it includes hatred, harsh words, dishonesty, and lying. When we commit any act of violence, that doesn't just solve a problem; it continues the cycle—one that will inevitably come back to injure us.

Nature isn't here for us to master; we're all a part of a natural ecosystem. We rely on it, and it depends on us—not exploiting it.

Many works of fiction describe humans in opposition to nature. If we don't conquer it, it will destroy us. In Daniel Quinn's philosophical text, "Ishmael," a psychic gorilla teaches his student about the folly of this perspective of man versus nature.

He describes humanity as falling off a cliff in our ongoing efforts to bend nature to our will. It's a good lesson to keep in mind when taking care of your home, for example.

If you have outdoor space, should you resist nature by maintaining perfectly cut grass, or should you consider letting the wilderness of nature take over?

You could grow native wildlife that supports the ecosystem. You have options that don't pit yourself against your natural surroundings.

To know someone is to objectify them. We see them as limited sets of possibilities and largely predict their behavior. But when we think of ourselves, we are ambiguous or capable of just about anything.

When talking to others, be sure to respect their ambiguous nature. As Simone de Beauvoir describes in "The Ethics of Ambiguity," limiting others this way can negatively affect their life and potentially ruin your relationship with them.

Be encouraging and try not to limit yourself at the same time. When faced with an anxiety-inducing situation, we'll often think we'll have these uncomfortable feelings forever.

But the mind adapts to exposure, and our anxiety can be reduced with repetition. This is how exposure therapy works and how we naturally adapt with experience.

You've probably noticed that the tenth time you've tried public speaking wasn't as nerve-wracking as the first, or that your last day on the job wasn't as stressful as the first.

We often let anxiety dictate what we attempt to do. We shy away from experiences that enrich our lives because we associate them with mental pain.

And while there's no denying that feeling anxious is kind of awful, it will ultimately pass. Eventually, that pain will end, and you'll feel more at ease in a larger variety of stressful situations. You'll be more at home in the world.

The year is 1665, and Isaac Newton is looking out his window at an apple tree standing tall in his orchard in Lincolnshire, England. All of a sudden, a ripe and lonely apple falls from the tree and makes its way to the ground.

While most people would consider this a mundane event, Newton followed its trajectory with great interest. What young Isaac didn't know at the time was that this apple would become the most famous piece of fruit in human history, as its natural attraction to the ground would spark a moment of genius, leading him to create the laws of motion that revolutionized modern physics.

Newton wasn't conducting an experiment when he discovered the laws of gravity. He wasn't overloading his brain with information trying to figure it out. He was simply looking aimlessly outside his window.

He was bored, but that was in the 17th century. Times have changed a lot since then. These days, we hardly ever allow ourselves to just stare out a window or sit in our backyards doing nothing but staring at the sky.

We never pause for a moment and just let our minds wander into deep, unexplored territories. It turns out that diving deep into our own thoughts is something that we don't really like to do.

We find it boring and will do anything to alleviate boredom, even if it means subjecting ourselves to self-inflicted electric shocks. This sadly is not an exaggeration. In a study conducted at the University of Virginia, a social psychologist named Timothy Wilson recruited hundreds of student volunteers to take part in what he called "thinking periods."

Individuals were placed in small rooms with blank walls and no personal belongings. They were asked to entertain themselves with nothing but their thoughts for just six to fifteen minutes. When asked to rate their experience afterwards, about 50% of the volunteers did not like being alone with their thoughts, citing it was boring.

Then researchers left the volunteers in the room for another fifteen minutes. This time, though, they introduced a button that participants could press to shock themselves if they wanted to. Around 67% of men and 25% of women chose to voluntarily inflict pain on themselves rather than just sit and do nothing.

This research suggests that sadly, a lot of us would rather experience physical pain than sit in our own thoughts. When left with nothing else to do, most of us immediately grab our phones, switching from one app to the other, as the algorithms of the internet feed us with the exact content that'll keep us from being bored.

What we fail to realize is that for these algorithms to understand what makes us tick, they take so much of our information. Companies then sell that information—things like your name, phone number, and home address—to data brokers, who sell them to other companies.

What's worse is that sometimes these data brokers are involved in data breaches, where all the information they have about you is stolen by nefarious actors.

In the spring-summer of 1665, an outbreak of bubonic plague spread through London, and by July had claimed more than 177,000 lives. Almost at once, people throughout the city began fleeing to the countryside, isolating themselves in fear for their lives. Among those who fled was none other than Sir Isaac Newton.

Of course, at that time, Newton had not yet been knighted; in fact, he had not yet even witnessed the famous apple falling. Interestingly, though, his two years spent in isolation away from the bells, whistles, and distractions of the city was the time when Newton's genius came to life, and he was able to invent calculus, create the science of motion, and develop a framework for gravity.

These two years spent in quarantine were Newton's own fifteen minutes, isolated in a room with nothing to do. Newton, however, didn't seek external stimuli to prevent his mind from wandering; instead, he welcomed the boredom that often comes with deep thinking and stared out the window, which has, without a doubt, paid dividends for all of humanity.

During this isolation in the countryside, Newton also invented calculus. Throughout his life, he also made major discoveries in optics, proposing that white light is actually a combination of light from all of the color spectrum.

Most famously, following his apple incident, he developed the three laws of motion. In all fairness, attributing Newton's greatest accomplishments to him being quarantined in the countryside is a bit misleading.

The truth is the incident of the apple falling wasn’t an isolated moment of genius. Newton's various contributions to science were the product of years of hard work and dedication, tediously working towards these moments of revelation. However, it is still helpful to recognize the importance of solitude and boredom in creating that particular "Eureka!" moment.

According to psychologist Dr. Sandy Mann of the University of Central Lancashire, once we start daydreaming and allow our brains to wander, like Newton did when he looked out the window, we start thinking beyond the conscious and into the subconscious, which allows for all sorts of connections to take place.

This is called the default mode. When you're bored or performing mundane tasks like doing the dishes or folding the laundry, your body may be on autopilot, but your brain is actually pretty busy.

When in the default mode, your mind gets the chance to connect to different ideas, try and solve some of your most pressing problems, and even create personal narratives or set goals.

This is why programmers often tell you that they figured out their problem with their code just as they were jumping into bed ready to get some shut-eye, or why you feel like your best ideas come when you jump in the shower.

The problem is that today, those are the very rare moments that we allow ourselves to be bored. Every other time, we almost always choose the electric shock method.

Living in a society where we have the entire world of entertainment at our fingertips has led to our immediate dissatisfaction with even seconds of boredom. The more we fill our world with fast-moving high-intensity stimulation, the more we get used to it and the less of a tolerance we have for boredom.

On average, Americans reach for their phones 344 times a day. That's once every four minutes. From quick email checks to diving down the rabbit hole of reels and memes, Americans spend an average of 2 hours and 54 minutes on their phone each day, with some people clocking up to 10 hours a day on their phones.

Without a doubt, technology has made the world a better place, but this unhealthy dependent relationship we have with our phones is robbing us of our most creative selves.

German psychologist Theodore Li proposed one of the first definitions of boredom in 1903, saying, “boredom is a feeling of displeasure arising out of conflict between a need for intense mental activity and lack of excitement to it, or inability to be incited.”

In other words, it's an underwhelming state where none of the options available to us seem appealing. Instead of letting this feeling run its course, we overstimulate our brain and prevent it from taking advantage of the true power of this downtime.

Our first instinct when we experience boredom is to just endlessly scroll through feeds, switching through social media apps, even when we're walking from one room to the next or waiting for the cashier to bag our groceries.

We've become conditioned to constantly seek out novelty and deliver a hit of dopamine to our brain. Sadly, once that sense of novelty fades, it leaves behind a stronger feeling of boredom, which we then try to get rid of with even more stimulation.

It's a vicious cycle that keeps our brain occupied with mindless entertainment designed to capture our attention for the longest time possible. Studies have shown that in one given task that requires minimum mental capacity, participants often contemplated their future and their plans for it.

On the other hand, if your brain is constantly consumed by stimuli, it'll rarely have the time to think of the bigger picture and is less likely to set goals for the future or to be more creative.

A 2017 study from Georgia Institute of Technology measured the brain patterns of more than 100 people. Participants were asked to focus on a stationary point while they lay in an MRI machine. The goal was to figure out which areas of the brain work together during an awake but resting state.

The team compared the data with questionnaires that the participants filled out about how much their minds wandered in daily life. It turns out participants who had reported more frequent daydreaming scored higher on intellectual and creative ability and had more efficient brain systems recorded on the MRI.

These findings are supported by a lot of artists when discussing their creative process. In his book "Creative Quest," music producer and drummer for The Roots, Questlove, wrote about his battle against the many distractions available to us in today's world.

On the face of it, it doesn't make any sense—boredom seems like the least creative feeling. But it's actually a way of clearing space for a new idea to spring back up.

Similarly, J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, formulated all the ideas for her book on a 4-hour train ride from Manchester to London. If she had had an iPad and binge-watched her favorite Netflix show instead, she probably wouldn't have brought Harry and his magical world to life.

In his book "Daily Ritual," Mason Curry studied the routines of hundreds of other artists, writers, and creatives, and concluded that boredom is a recurring theme that leads to the mind wandering and having a kind of diffused focus, which allows for creative production.

This diffused state is when the mind enters its default mode and comes up with its best work. Perhaps the best proof of this truth is none other than Albert Einstein himself.

Einstein took over where Newton left off and gave us a more advanced definition of gravity with a notion of curved space-time. Einstein was known for his extremely vivid imagination and inspired thought experiments that allowed him to define time as the fourth dimension and to change our understanding of the mechanics of the universe itself.

Many people believe that the seeds of his genius were planted during the year he took off from high school in the 1890s, when he simply wandered without purpose and contemplated the world free from any external pressures.

Throughout his life, Einstein would take regular walks to clear his mind, and in a letter he wrote to his friends while sailing in 1932, he said, "A cruise in the sea is an excellent opportunity for maximum calm and reflection on ideas from a different perspective."

It was clear that he knew the importance of sitting still and letting the mind wander. Our history is full of many great thinkers who have been conscious enough to take advantage of their downtime and utilize it in the name of creative production.

Psychologists today encourage parents to allow their children to be bored instead of occupying all their time watching YouTube on their tablets. The idea is to give the young minds the time and space needed to discover, create, and find their own genius.

Teaching people, especially kids, how to use technology to improve their lives while also self-regulating their exposure to it should be a crucial part of digital literacy.

There's a saying used in tech: when the product is free, you are the product. Our attention is being fought for by a magnitude of applications, and at the end of the day, we're left with no time to just sit and contemplate our own life and experiences. But that shouldn't be the case.

Next time you find yourself reaching for your phone when you're bored, remember you're choosing to voluntarily shock yourself instead of looking out the window and contemplating your own metaphorical apple falling from the tree.

You'd be surprised what your mind can achieve when you just allow it to wander for a moment.

To everything, there is a season—a time to be born and a time to die. For some, it's Grandma or Grandpa; for others, it's Mom or Dad. For some, it's a brother, a sister, a friend, or a lover. Whoever it is, whenever it is, one thing is for sure: at some point, we have all experienced the listing of death.

We often talk so much about the beginning of life. We throw parties to find out what the birth gender of the baby is, and then we throw another party to shower them with gifts.

And then we throw another party once they spend their first 12 months on this earth, and every 12 months after that. We share stories about the day we were born, albeit stories we cannot remember ourselves and have only formed from the pieces we've been told by different sources.

We talk a lot about birth, but usually never about death. Most times, the first we're forced to speak of it, it has already taken someone we love. But it doesn't have to be this way.

We are all going to die someday, so we might at least talk about it while we can.

Here is to death. As everyone knows, death is the end of, well, everything for you. It's when all the body's vital functions stop permanently. Your heart stops beating, your breath ceases, you lose all brain activity.

Their heart is failing, and the body is now experiencing circulation changes. Their heartbeat is becoming fainter, and their skin no longer radiates like the summer sun. The pale gray-blue of winter starts to take over, most visible on the knees, hands, and legs.

Their breathing becomes erratic. Sometimes it's slow; sometimes it's fast. Sometimes it's faint; sometimes it's loud. Chain-stokes are happening now. They take several breaths, then a long pause with no breathing at all.

And just when we think they're gone, they gasp and take yet another breath. They're not there yet, but they're close. In a few hours, they'll take another long pause, but then there will be no gasp to break the silence.

When most people are about to leave us to the other side of life, they claim to feel a sense of readiness, like they're wrapped in Mother Nature's arms—similar to the feeling of a baby in their mother's womb.

There's a sense of comfort, a sense of completion, a sense of peace. People are often well aware of what is coming next and can even hold on for something significant to happen before giving up the ghost.

You might wait for your mother to come so you can tell her you appreciate everything she did for you as a child, or perhaps place a call to a friend to tell them you forgive them for everything they did wrong to you.

Or maybe you're waiting to hold your kids in your arms again or kiss your partner on the cheek one last time. When death comes knocking, we often already know who's at the door. We prepare ourselves and ready our houses before walking out the door, locking it, and throwing out the key.

As we walk out the door, we gradually become confused. We slip into an unconscious state one last time as we draw the curtains to what our life was.

As we walk out the door, we gradually become confused. We slip into an unconscious state one last time as we draw the curtains to what was our life.

We die. Everything that happens up until this point we know and understand, but everything that happens afterward is still a complete mystery to us.

The craziest thing about death is that we often describe it as irreversible. What is dead will stay dead. But there are thousands of people out there who have been medically described as dead but have come back, carrying with them tons of incredible stories.

We call these near-death experiences because, again, we believe if it was actual death, they wouldn't be alive to tell the story. But is that true? We might just never know.

There's a wealth of information out there with regards to near-death experiences. People who have been medically described as dead for hours, and some days, come back to life with stories of out-of-body experiences, memories of their time in the afterlife, down to some incredible specifics about this side of life that they just couldn't have made up.

One thing many people who have near-death experiences agree upon is the fact that the phrase "life flashes before your eyes" is very true. Just before the heart flatlines, we're often presented with a view of our entire life.

However, it's not like we think it is. It's not the big moments in life that flash before our eyes—it's not the wedding, the graduation, the first time you heard the cry of your child. It's just random stuff.

It's riding your bike as a kid, sitting at your desk, and randomly checking your email, staring at a white cat while climbing a flight of stairs. It's the things that we don't give any thought to—the moments we don't usually remember in life—that are brought before us in the face of death.

If you thought staring at a white cat while climbing a flight of stairs was oddly specific, well, it's because it is a young man who went through a near-death experience saw this moment as one of life's flashes.

However, he could not remember ever being on that staircase or seeing a white cat. So after he was resuscitated, he was able to draw the layout of the staircase, the apartment it led to, and described the cat to his mother.

And she told him that they had once lived in that exact building with the same staircase and apartment layout, and they had lived there with someone who owned a white cat.

Not such a crazy story until you realize that he and his mother moved out of that apartment when he was just 14 months old.

This begs the question: are all of our memories still in there, even the ones we've forgotten? When we die, do we get to see everything that we thought we forgot during our time on this side of life? Is what has gone only temporary?

One of the reasons death is scary to a lot of people is that it seems very lonely. You came into this world alone, but do we leave alone?

Many people who have had near-death experiences explain that they saw a dead relative there to either escort them to the afterlife or tell them it wasn't their time yet. But whichever it was, death was definitely not as lonely as we might think.

Whether this was simply a figment of their imagination trying to reassure them and make them comfortable in their last few moments, or it was really the spirit or soul of their dead relatives is something we'll never be able to say for sure.

However, what we do know is that death, for most people, is not lonely—or at least does not feel that way. Speaking of the soul, this is one concept that science has not been able to figure out yet—or at least have some kind of explanation for.

But with the number of near-death experiences associated with an out-of-body experience, it might be time to start rethinking whether it's something that can even be explained by science.

I once came across the story of a freshman in college who had just overdosed on sleeping meds. They flatlined in the ambulance and were declared legally dead for three minutes. However, they experienced everything in the ambulance, not from their own eyes, but from a third-person view—an out-of-body experience.

What was striking was that they saw the EMT who was trying to resuscitate them in the ambulance—minty green hair, so distinct you couldn't miss it. After they were stabilized at the hospital three days later, they asked for this EMT.

The EMT, who they had seen while they were dead, was a real person. The out-of-body experience they had while in the ambulance was filled with real memories of them lying down on the ambulance floor, machines beeping, and the EMT struggling to bring them back.

You hear things like this, and you have to pause and wonder: do we really not have a soul, whatever that may be? Are we literally just made of random atoms and molecules responding to stimuli that Mother Nature throws at us?

Or perhaps are we something more? These are the stories and experiences of people who have managed to escape the permanence of death and have battle scars to show for it.

However, for most, what is dead remains dead. And so around one to two weeks later, it's time to say our final goodbyes.

Much of what we know about human history is down to how we've buried our dead. From tombs to mummies, dead people have given us more information than the living left behind.

The oldest known international burial sites date back around 10,000 years ago in C cave, Israel. The remains of the dead were put carefully in a coffin, together with items such as garments, trinkets, and food, and these coffins were then placed carefully in a cave.

There was also evidence in this cave that the living painted the remains of the dead through parties and great feasts to honor their passing, and people were buried in groups of families.

This means that even as far back as 10,000 years ago, humanity understood the significance of death and the need to celebrate a life well spent.

To date, many different cultures do funerals differently. Most people sit together to reminisce about the life once lived, talking about all the good the person did while they were alive. Many religious organizations pray over the remains to give them a favorable outcome in the afterlife.

But what that afterlife is is different for different people. Abrahamic religions believe that your actions on this earth determine where you spend eternity afterward. Families are encouraged to be strong in the face of death, as we would all eventually be reconnected when we cross to the other side.

For some other religions, like Hinduism, what is dead shall be reborn. After the ceremonies and prayers, the bodies are buried or cremated, and the living that are gathered disperse in a bid to heal from the hurt of losing someone.

Even when we expect it, death is extremely painful because the idea of losing someone isn't the same as actually losing them and mourning the relationship that it once was.

Although we are fully aware that these things can happen and that they are part of the human experience, when we are faced with the harsh reality, the feeling of grief can be excruciating. The finality of death is its scariest attribute—the waking up one morning and realizing that everything we once had—shared experiences—they're all gone forever.

The fact that all we will have are those memories—old memories we cannot recreate and new memories we cannot form. But more often than not, these experiences give us a new perspective on life.

It reaffirms the reality of the brevity of life and gives us the courage to experience all that we can in the short time we have on this earth. It teaches us to be good people while we're alive because we won't be there to defend ourselves when the eulogies are being read about us as we lie in an open casket.

And in the end, we're better equipped to help people going through the same thing because people are better comforted by others who have had a similar experience. Seeing someone just like you survive through their own loss gives you a sense of hope that maybe, just maybe, you too will be able to pull through.

When you're sitting there staring at your loved one who is about to die, understand that death is normally not as painful and troubling for the person dying as it is for you. For the next two hours, sit with them; squeeze their hand in yours. Talk about all the beautiful things in life, about shared experiences, about their kids and pets, their lovers and friends.

Talk about a life worth living until its last breath. Talk about a life well spent. Talk about death.

The earth will keep spinning; the birds will keep chirping. But eventually, everything has an end.

To be alone forever—some people's greatest fear—a table for one at a fancy restaurant, falling asleep in a cold bed, a quiet, empty house with no one to share your wins and losses with, no one to witness your happiest moments or comfort you in your most difficult ones.

It's that sinking feeling in your chest, imagining that you're unlovable and undesirable and fearing you might remain that way forever. If you're single, there's a high likelihood that you've felt this way before.

And if you have, there's no reason to be ashamed of it. It's normal, or dare I say, expected that you'd feel this way in a world obsessed with romantic partnerships. These fears are echoed everywhere—in the movies we watch, the songs we listen to, and even in social and political discussions.

One of the first insults you hear thrown around is, "You'll never find love." Thinking this way, unfortunately, is why many people enter and stay in relationships that might not be the best, because we have this notion that being with anyone is better than being alone.

But what if we could change our thinking about being single and focus more on the positive aspects of it? Here is why you should stay single.

Embracing life without a romantic partner isn't easy, but if you do the work and are honest and intentional with yourself, you can create a great life for yourself. You can find happiness on your own, and for many of us, it's easier than finding the right partner.

The first thing to remember is that being single isn't the same as being alone or lonely. You can be romantically single and still have fulfilling relationships with family and friends.

Sharing your life with the people you love doesn't necessarily have to involve romance. There's this unspoken expectation that our romantic partners have to be our everything. They need to be our best friends, counselors, caregivers, and providers.

These necessary roles can easily be filled by multiple people in our lives. You could even argue that spreading your support network across multiple people is better.

It's unrealistic to think that one person can fulfill your every need and desire. In fact, this is one of the reasons a lot of relationships end—one party feels so burdened by all the emotional weight in the relationship that they burn out.

By learning to share these roles and expanding your support network, you're better prepared for the difficulties in life. You're also less likely to feel lonely because you have more people to lean on.

Even if your relationship with one person is suffering, you have others to turn to. This is why so many people are lonely, even people in relationships, because they put all of their expectations on one person.

They start to feel alienated and alone when those expectations are not being met. This dynamic of being alone with a partner can cut deeper than the loneliness you feel when you're single.

Because in a partnership, you're not supposed to feel lonely, so adding to your loneliness is the shame and the guilt of feeling lonely in the first place. It's also difficult to share this feeling with others. Friends might have difficulty believing you because they see the snippets of life with your partner, so they remind you of the good times and tell you that all relationships require hard work.

Because it's commonly believed that being lonely together is better than being alone, many people stay in relationships that they should leave because they're afraid of being single.

And if more people had a positive view of single life, I think the pressure to stay in unhappy relationships would decrease. Being in a relationship doesn't mean you'll become your best self, but this still seems to be the way of life.

Our pressure to conform to romance is the central theme of countless Hollywood blockbusters, novels, and TV shows. We're constantly being sold the idea that love will complete us, that we're nothing on our own.

We're taught to look for our better half as if we can't be whole on our own. Even apart from the stories told to us by the media, society also seems to favor people who are in couples.

Practically, life is just so much cheaper when you have someone to split the rent and groceries with. Health care plans and travel expenses privilege couples.

Setting money aside, a spouse or a common-law partner holds a certain status in your life—like an extension of yourself. Your partner holds the title of someone who knows you better than anyone else, even if you have a friend or family member who might be worthy of that role.

Friends and family might see your life as incomplete without a special someone. Everything could be going right for you, but without a partner, you might be pitted and seen as a failure.

The people in your life could be trying to influence you to find someone, making you feel that being alone is an inferior option. And after a while, you believe it's what you should do.

But it doesn't have to be this way. There are lots of ways to live a happy life, and it's important to know what it feels like to live a happy life on your own.

While it is true that the world isn't set up to support single people, there are huge benefits to spending life on your own. When you're single, you have complete control over your life choices.

Want to move to a new city or change careers? You can fully pivot the direction of your life without having to consider the needs or wants of a partner. You can take risks without fear that your choices will negatively impact someone else.

You don't have to feel guilty about going after what you truly want, because ultimately, the only person you have to consider is yourself.

It extends to little things like decorating your house, what time you want to wake up in the morning, and what you eat for dinner. While these sound like small luxuries, this kind of freedom and independence doesn't come easy with a partner.

Even with active communication, when you're single, everything in your life is entirely in your control. And this might sound daunting. Some people prefer being told what to do.

It's why a lot of people are stuck in codependent relationships that they can't get out of. But being single forces you to work through any of the issues of dependency you might have.

The control you gain over your life allows you to develop a sense of self and to figure out who you really are and what you want out of life. As an adult, singleness is the first time you get this opportunity.

As a child, choices were made for you, and as a young adult, the school system controls most of your waking hours. If you're ushered straight from that phase into a series of relationships, you'll never really know what it feels like to live life uninfluenced.

While some might be fine with this, I think it can stunt your growth as an independent adult. You have the chance to get to know who you are when no one's watching, and you gain trust in your ability to make the right choices for yourself.

Don't deny yourself the opportunity of self-discovery. An extended period of your life free from any notion of romance can help you tune into your emotional side. You learn what it feels like to listen to yourself without the distraction of outside noise that a partner brings.

You can hear what you want and follow through on your desires. When you become good at listening to yourself, you can begin to live a life that aligns with your own values.

You learn how to soothe yourself in times of stress, take care of yourself, and enjoy your own company. And it sounds easy, right?

Well, being single definitely also has its downsides. I don't want to paint a romanticized version of being single because that would be ironic.

You see, even with the best friends and family, being single can still be lonely. Your friends and family have other people they're devoted to, and because you're not in a romantic relationship with them, they don't owe you first priority in their lives.

You might want to vent to someone after a rough day at work and find that your friends are too busy and can't meet up. Managing chores and life tasks all on your own can be a challenge.

Then there's the emotional and physical intimacy that most of us crave, even if only occasionally. Someone to buy you flowers or just make a cup of coffee for you in the morning.

Also, in a partnership, it can be easy to blame your problems on another person. When you're single, there is no place to hide; you have to take responsibility for your life—the good and the bad.

If something is happening that's making you miserable, then you are the one who needs to change it. The difficulties of living alone can be so intense that they sometimes lead people to turn towards unsatisfactory relationships.

Scrolling through dating apps, trying to find the next first date, finding comfort in awkward situationships, or constantly seeking casual sex can all be coping mechanisms for staving off loneliness.

Of course, finding yourself in strange unfulfilling romantic entanglements isn't the end of the world—in each case, it's specific. But using other people to shield or distract ourselves from our insecurities and problems is easy.

It helps us avoid looking deep within ourselves and investigating our dependent behavior. I think intentional singleness requires a lot of courage. It shows you're willing to plunge into the depths of yourself without fear of what you'll find.

It can be seen as an act of self-love. You're willing to be your own company, spend time with yourself, and let your thoughts and actions guide the trajectory of your life.

Your sense of worth, desirability, and validation has to come within. You can't fast track this. Work through a month or two of being single between relationships.

It might take years of singleness to realize that you're better off on your own, or prefer to be alone rather than with someone you don't like. You might even arrive at a place where you prefer to remain single forever.

But this time, it doesn't come with a sinking feeling of despair, but with excitement and a sense of liberation. If you're currently in a loving romantic relationship, don't take this as a reason to break up with them.

Being in a relationship has its merits, and what you want from life is different for everyone. I can't deny that dating can be fun, and every relationship you have is an opportunity to learn more about yourself, albeit through the lens of somebody else.

Plus, you could fall in love and find the perfect partner that feels like they complete you, and spend the rest of your life with them. Because truly, there is no template to this life.

Remember that staying single for a while doesn't completely mean ignoring your desire for a relationship one day. Instead, it's an opportunity to find satisfaction despite that desire.

It's about recognizing who you can be when you're alone and the type of person who could compliment you—who you are special in worth protecting.

And after a season of being alone, you'll more likely value yourself and your time. You'll know that it's only worth being in a relationship if it supports who you truly are, and if not, you'll have the confidence that you can remain alone.

True compatibility is hard to find, and the mysteries of attraction are far too complex to dive into here. But after spending some time on your own, what if you do meet someone? Someone who adds to what you've built for yourself.

They can acknowledge and love the person you've become when no one's watching. How can you deny yourself that?

To be single doesn't mean you have to stay single forever if that isn't something you want. It's a chance to get to know yourself better and the value of your time and who you really are.

It's about recognizing that you shouldn't just throw yourself at anyone for the sake of companionship, but it's also about not getting too tied up in yourself that you close yourself off from any real chance at love.

Finding happiness on your own is important, but sharing happiness with another person could also be important. A saying goes: happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower.

Don't get so caught up in your single life that you find yourself clutching the seed in your fist with a death grip. When the right person comes along, open your hand and invite them into your world—and don't be afraid to spend some time in theirs too.

If what you've built is stable, you can always return, and that confidence is what makes the best relationships. Only when you spent time nurturing your seed of happiness will it be ready to bloom when someone comes along to water it.

Love is a truly complex thing. Watch this next video to find out all about it.

People simply empty out their bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly, and the body—the hair, the fingernails, the shoes—everything does.

Does this sound familiar? A long day looking in front of the computer screen causes an aching feeling behind the eyes. Your legs turn to jelly after spending a long shift behind the cash register.

Your skin becomes pale and gray with too much time under fluorescent warehouse lights. The 9-to-5 continues to diminish our morale and humanity. Why are we doomed to this unsustainable way of life?

These were the same questions posed by writer Charles Bukowski in a famous letter to his friend John Martin. Born in Germany and raised in 1930s Los Angeles, Bukowski faced a rough childhood marked by abuse, poverty, and bullying.

His hardships fostered an early dependency on alcohol. Bukowski attempted to pursue a career in writing in New York after high school, but financial struggles forced his return to L.A., where he reluctantly spent almost a decade as a postal clerk.

His detest for the 9-to-5 lifestyle became a barrier to his creative aspirations. After his career with the Postal Service, Bukowski wrote an autobiographical novel about his working years, aptly titled "Post Office." Its publication launched his career and he became a literary sensation at age 51.

Fifteen years later, in his famous letter, Bukowski wrote of how 9-to-5 work empties the body and drains the worker of any essential life.

It's hard to believe that the eight-hour workday came to be through activism. Between the late 17th and mid-1800s, the Industrial Revolution transformed the working world. Instead of working in the home and sustaining their family off of small trade loops within their community, people started selling their labor to companies.

Let's use the textile industry as an example. Mechanization meant clothing was now a good to be bought and sold instead of made in the home. Laborers were required to work on the factory floor. They would then use their work money to buy the required goods and services.

Working outside the home for a company was a massive economic shift, and it resonates in the modern day. Income and population rose as this change significantly increased global living standards.

But an average working day this time could range from ten to sixteen hours, and children were not exempt from the labor force. Rumblings of dissent reverberated among workers, as fatigue, sickness, and injury were common in the workplace.

So in the early 19th century, activist Robert Owen proposed standardizing a ten-hour workday. By 1817, an even better proposal of an eight-hour workday gained popularity. Labor activists believed that eight hours of the day should be dedicated to work, eight hours to rest, and eight hours to recreation.

This revolution improved working conditions and also productivity. Foremen and managers realized that happy, healthy workers were more productive.

But how much of your time off each day or supposed recreation time is used to prepare yourself for the next day? Does this tidy division of time work?

In reality, your allotted eight hours for recreation per day quickly dissolves when you add meal prep, commuting, laundry, housework, childcare, and errands into the mix. And at the end of all that, do you even have quality recreation time?

Each day you spend your evenings in front of the TV, doom scrolling or playing video games, which is okay in moderation, but the demands of your work life and the activities that require you to be an optimal worker tire you out.

You feel too drained to partake in hobbies or activities that would otherwise fulfill you. Also, with the dawn of smartphones and wireless file sharing, it's easy for your workday to extend into the night.

You're expected to be on the clock, checking emails and finalizing presentations, even in your pajamas on the couch. Your work time bleeds over into your rest until you can't see where one role ends and the other begins.

Worse, the extra time you've put in at home doesn't exempt you from clocking back in the following day at nine. Even the self-help movement disguises its motives to sneak its way into making you a better participant in capitalism.

You're only creating a more productive worker by molding a better you. Things like "Atomic Habits," "overcoming supposed laziness," and "manifestation" promise to lead you to your professional goals while creating a happy, healthier you.

Self-help gurus teach you how to do more with less instead of reassessing the root of why the system has left you broken. Writer and cultural critic Gia Tolentino takes this further in her essay "Always Be Optimizing."

According to her, every aspect of modern life is geared towards creating a more efficient you. From workout crazes to salad bars, you never have a moment where you are off the clock.

In a world that strives to produce the best workers, if you're interested, I have a video about self-improvement where I talk about this further. But if you spend most of your life working or preparing to work for a job you resent or don't enjoy, how can you expect to be happy?

Yes, it might be hard to get out of bed in the morning or find motivation, but for some, discontent in the workplace leads to violent outbursts. Ever wonder where the phrase "going postal" comes from?

Well, in the late '80s and early '90s, there were a series of workplace shootings in U.S. postal offices across America, killing at least 35 people. The gunmen associated with these murders are classified as workplace avengers.

They were often middle-aged white men facing economic anxiety, obsolescence, or possible termination from their job at the peak of their earning potential. They become resentful when they feel like they aren't making what they should be at work.

Their coworkers become symbolic of their fury, which results in violent behavior. Often, these homicides were caused by people diagnosed with mental illness or antisocial behavior. Most of the time, they were triggered by wanting to take revenge on a boss or the institution after a firing or reprimand.

It's called murder by proxy, where you transfer the identity of your intended victim onto anyone slightly associated with the shooter's wanted vengeance on their workplace. Their colleagues were sadly representative of that place.

The Postal Service conducted an internal review to try and find the root cause of this discontent. Of course, there's not one specific reason that links all of these instances of workplace violence—the nature of the work is a common denominator.

There are many structural problems with the U.S. Postal Service that are too tedious to get into here, but one of the findings revealed that rural postal workers are happier than urban ones.

Rural workers create their schedules and are in charge of how they carry out their work each day. If they get all the mail delivered by the end of the day, that's a job well done. Urban workers, however, negotiate their workload each day with managers.

In urban centers, the Postal Service must squeeze the maximum of efficiency out of each worker. They'd rather hand out overtime and overrun the workers they have than hire more.

And that one difference—choosing how you will complete your work for the day—is a determining factor of overall happiness at work. Work is whittled down to its most essential parts in industries with winding resources.

When profit is king, there's no room to innovate your work structure to support workers better. Something happens when workers become starkly aware of their place as a cog in the machine.

While most people don't retaliate against the system in a homicidal rage, we spend so much of our lives working that it has an evident influence on our emotional health. Busting your butt