Choice

The Truth About Struggle and Meaningful Progress

March 3, 2016 By Uncoveries

“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.”

– Albert Camus

Struggle has a bad rap. If asked, most of us would likely opt against struggle, preferring to avoid it if we can.

Yet, at the same time, we can’t seem to escape it. Struggle is everywhere. Unavoidable.

Many of us are familiar with struggle as a part of our lives. We understand that anything worth having requires a level of hard work and consistency. Much more, it’s reinforced through our parents, authority figures and general society.

We’re told to work hard and put our nose to the grindstone. 52% of us are dissatisfied with our jobs yet we still stay in them. When something takes longer or more work than we expect, we’re told it’s part of the game and that dues need to be paid.

But for what? Is it worth it?

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The 7 Myths of Happiness, Part 3

June 29, 2015 By Uncoveries

Warm sunshine. Bountiful smiles. Open laughter.

The popularized idea of happiness is free-spirited and effortless; it is less often associated with concentration, hard work or sacrifice. In addition to believing the myth of happiness is a must, we also have this idea that happiness is easy. There is often an odd sense of entitlement and lackadaisicalness that’s assumed with happiness. Many of us have an underlying belief that happiness is something that should exist without any effort on our part.

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Your Life Crisis Explained: It’s the Stage Not the Age

May 4, 2015 By Uncoveries

A movement is brewing.

Call it what you wish: quarter-life crisis, Millennial entitlement (although some disagree), boomerang or Peter Pan syndrome, but it’s real. In increasing numbers, young adults ranging in their early twenties to mid-thirties are realizing their lives are not what they want and taking steps towards the search. Gone are the days of blindly following the step-by-step, conventional path of the school system, college, and stable career with a company.

With the freedom of choice and paradoxically abundant and sparse options, many are feeling more conflicted than ever.

In the Great Recession, many of us struggled to find a decent paying full-time job after college, picking up service industry, part-time or whatever work we could find to pay the rent. For those who found full-time jobs right after college, we steadily worked our 9 to 5 (if we were lucky) or more hours depending on industry, field and business climate. In either scenario, a mass sense of dissatisfaction remained constant; a sense there must be more to life than making a paycheck and buying bigger, better and more things.

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Tempering Your Life Balance: The 3 Stage Process

April 28, 2015 By Uncoveries

Temperance plays a part in each of our worlds. It’s a fickle game—a puzzle for each person to determine his or her personal settings in life. Some people live their whole lives off-balance, never fully reaching their potential.

How temperance is defined here is balancing the temporal enjoyments you value (whether it be food, drink, consumer goods, travel, stability, independence, freedom of time) with the bigger goals you have in life. There is a personal line between excess and intention. Stepping over the line slides into diminished meaning or deprivation. In times when my focus was indulgence in its diverse forms, what I found instead was a labyrinth-like, sneaking sense that something was missing. In yo-yoing from one extreme to the other, Goldilocks style, I’ve learned the following: the grass is not greener on the other side; it’s different with its own set of pros and cons and the same in its lack of solution.

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