Most suffering that people in the modern world do is their own fault.

Sure… there is real suffering but since you’re spending your time on the internet reading study blogs, I think it’s reasonably safe to assuming you’re suffering too much devastating horror in life. (If so, congrats for being this damn focused.)

The way you feel usually comes down to the way you look at your situation.

Two people given the same stimuli can choose to take that stimuli in dramatically different ways.

Imagine a cool person says hi to you. You might take that as a bit of a compliment. You might get excited. You might not think twice about it.

If you were bullied by people like this person then you might think more negatively.

If you’re not used to that kind of thing you might start thinking, “what is he up to?” You  might start wondering if he’s about to make fun of you or something. This isn’t so exciting when these kinds of thoughts are going through your head.

The reality is, this cool person probably hasn’t given you more than a single thought. It’s a “hi.” It’s your thinking that’s turning it into something good or bad.

This is the way most major “problems” work.

Something doesn’t work exactly as we had hoped and we assume this is a major issue.

The reality is that most stuff shouldn’t work exactly as you hoped.

That’s the nature of reality. Unless you hope for dramatically boring and predictable things, you’re not often going to get exactly what you want.

Whenever you find yourself having a bad day you should stop and think about why that is.

Are you really upset that your lunch had a hair in it or a friend wasn’t particularly friendly today?

Do you really want to let stray hairs and circumstances that could just be random coincidences or moods give you a bad day?

It really is your choice. I’m willing to bet there are millions of people having an objectively dramatically worse day than you but still feeling pretty darn good about it.

(Yea… some days I just want to have a bad day and I don’t care about whether it’s logical or not. That’s cool too.)