Most people have a difficult time staying present.
If you’re ambitious, you’re always looking to the future and trying to sacrifice the now for opportunities later.
If you’re not ambitious, you’re probably wasting your time now mindlessly and not really having a true guilt-free good time either.
As with everything in life, the best lies in between the middle where you’re not miserably sacrificing every moment now and you’re also not throwing away your time.
There’s a few mental models, tricks, and frameworks I want to discuss in this thread to start aligning yourself more closely to the middle of both extremes.
First, identify and jump off as many hedonic treadmills as you can in your life.
A hedonic treadmill is when you are chasing some external possession or opportunity (at the expense of now) because you believe it will buy you more satisfaction.
A common hedonic treadmill is sacrificing your precious time in high school wanting to get into a top college just so you can get a top job and so you can rise the ranks in a top job and so on and so forth.
Notice how there’s no end in sight of these goals? Once you achieve one part of a hedonic treadmill, you still aren’t satisfied and so you move the goalpost further.
People commonly confuse hedonic treadmills for “ambition” and “hustle” but really this is the definition of excessive desires breeding unhappiness.
Choose to be happy now internally, and do not have too many desires.
Hedonic treadmills are not limited to just professional settings, they show up everywhere from your romantic partners looks to money and body image and follower counts.
Next, try to identify and limit the amount of desires in your life.
If you want lots of money, great.
But be willing to sacrifice other parts of your life that you may not have the same drive for.
There is a finite amount of time and mind power and so we cannot have everything we want.
Ruthlessly cut the amount of external desires to just the bare minimum, then focus all of your efforts on achieving that desire.
Finally, understand that there are unlimited external problems and sometimes you just have to enjoy your life.
Ask yourself the question “what am I excited about and why am I not doing it right now.” Confucius had a great saying “everyone has two lives and the first one starts when they realize they only have one.” Tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Hell, even the next minute isn’t.
So embrace every moment, cherish the small things, show love to the people around you, live your life, and be happy.