Instead of Spending Your Life Afraid of Missing It, Dare to Be Yourself.
Better to try and fail, than to have regrets forever.
In a modern society that no longer seems to forgive failure or mistakes, more and more people start to feel a painful sense of having failed in their lives, when they are between forty and fifty years old.
The reasons vary: a divorce, a professional failure, a quarrel with one's parents, an irreconcilable quarrel with one's children, ...
But the observation that emerges is the same: “I have failed in my life!”
This brings us back to an interesting philosophical question: Can we miss our life? What can lead us, one day, to make such a definitive and hopeless judgment about ourselves?
This notion of having failed in life is subjective, but the same regrets often come up
To fail is to fail to reach the goal that one had set. The feeling of failure that some people experience is therefore totally subjective: it depends on the objectives of each person, on the criteria that we consider to be the success of an existence.
However, in the evening of life, the regrets expressed would always be a little the same, assuring the American Bronnie Ware, a nurse in palliative care, who collected the confidence of her patients on this delicate subject during their last weeks of life. “Having lived my life according to other people's expectations and not my own” would be the most expressed regret, ahead of “having worked too much and not having seen my children grow up” (especially among men) or “not having dared to express my feelings for fear of conflict”.
In her book “Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departed”, the nurse concludes :
“Most people have not achieved half of their dreams and have to die with the awareness that this is due to the choices they have made or not made.”
When asked about the things that would give them that feeling of having their life, people equally believe that it is related to the quality of their personal life (family, relationship, ...) than to their career or salary. A high proportion also believes that real success is based on having real friends in life.
In our modern societies, the success of life would be linked above all to the links we create with others, to the possibility of passing on or investing in a collective project.
This success also depends on the means we give ourselves to live by ourselves and express all our potential. To say outright that one has failed in life is therefore too radical. Of course, there can be suffering from the unrealized, which we must question to move forward.
What makes us happy? This is a question to meditate on.
To avoid regrets and the feeling of having missed your life, you must dare to be yourself
What makes us happy is to unfold our deepest nature with a certain requirement, to find our reason for living, our vocation, “where your talents and the world's needs cross, there lies your vocation”, as Aristotle said. Success in life depends on a dynamic of accomplishment, and for that, it is never too late.
This notion is essential to integrate because life sometimes takes detours, which are not necessarily failures but opportunities to mature and get closer to our desires. Life is also made of choices and renunciations, as life's ambitions may not be in harmony with each other. A life of travel and adventure, for example, may not be compatible with having a large family.
Of course, there may be some regrets that are more nagging than others, such as not having had children. But it is also possible to find other ways to have a fruitful life, to fulfill our need to pass on, to take care of someone. The feeling of missing out on life is sometimes linked to injunctions - unconsciously inherited from our parents, and our social environment ... - or to the habit we often have of comparing ourselves to others, exacerbated by social networks.
There is a traditional model of success, which is evaluated by others, thanks to external achievements (honors, status, wealth ...), but there is also another model, more frequent among the younger generations, which is evaluated above all about oneself, to the feeling of accomplishment that one can feel. In this second model, we can rejoice in the success of others because success is linked to the uniqueness of each individual.
Final Thoughts
To avoid having regrets in the evening of our life, we should finally grant ourselves the right to not always be successful, to try, to look for what makes us happy, without taking too much account of the look of others, without letting ourselves be paralyzed by the fear of failing... Paradoxically, it is often this fear of failing that can distance us from our deepest aspirations, and therefore prevent us from succeeding.
This same fear will then be responsible for the feeling of having failed in your life or of having missed the essential. To finish, the best thing is to free yourself from society's gaze and dare to be yourself. You will often fail, you will sometimes succeed, but you will feel happy to have followed your desires. And that's the most important thing.
Some reading
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