Inspired Series: Life is highs and lows, but perspective is everything

Perspective. 

You gain it with age and personal experience.

But you also gain it by listening to someone else; someone with a different lens on life. 

Someone like ____, a 99 year old retired physician who lived through World War I, practiced medicine during the pre-penicillin era, and thrived in a telephoneless world during his earlier years. 

“Life isn’t as simple anymore,” he remarks as he sits besides his partially blind wife 

who he reminds everyday that he loves. 

The latest generation of youths- millennials, gen Z, gen X, or whatever else we're called-  has been born into a much more complicated world. Technology has blossomed, education has become more competitive, and opportunities have become seemingly endless. 

With such growth and progress, however, has come what I’ve coined the “false happiness plague”- the unrealistic expectations we’ve come to place on our moods, assuming “happy” should be our default state and anything besides it makes us wrong, flawed, or unfulfilled. 

Much of this false idea is due to the sheer number of choices this generation has, __ shares. 

“Now you can become anything. It’s unlimited. You can pick anything out of a hat and specialize in it.”

Perhaps, with the number of options available, we become insistent on ensuring 

that the one we choose is the best one. 

The one that’ll make us happy for life.

No, but really, ask yourself how many times as a student you’ve envisioned yourself as happy when you achieve your career goal. We treat our years as students as the steps towards happiness. Not a part of it. 

After practicing as a urologist for 20 years in St.Petersburg, ___, insists that careers aren’t what make or keep people happy.

It’s family; it’s the people in our lives. 

And so, as an experienced, talented physician, ___ went back to school to create a life that would allow him to enjoy both his job and his home-life;  he became an anesthesiologist who spent the next 14-15 years enjoying his job and the role of a husband and father. 

Aside from the excessive attention placed on careers, ____, furthers that this generation also has a malhabit of letting current worries or troubles dictate their thoughts on the future.

Worries such as finances. 

“Jean and I got married and we literally had nothing. We were in poverty.”

“But, it didn’t bother us because we knew our future was brighter because of education. We had nothing, but we were all in it together.”

And during the pandemic, I’ve really gotten a taste of the truth behind ___’s words. While we are all awaiting a vaccine or the spread of herd immunity, most of us are left with “nothing” more we can really do. 

But, I repeat, most of us have nothing; we are all experiencing the same thing. 

In this way, you could say we have quite the opposite of nothing. 

“It’s an oversimplification,” ___ says, “but life is highs and lows.”

No one promised us a life of all highs, no one is equating a good life to that of 

no lows, and no one is living a life of just one.  

No one. 

Hearing these words is one thing, but letting these words sit with you, letting 

these ideas clash with your current outlooks and help to replace with new, wiser 

ones is another. 

“There is no simple solution” to dealing with anxiety or depression. 

But, I think a lot of the pain can be alleviated by focusing on our expectations of happiness.

"The only place that everything is perfect is in fairytales and in fiction.”