It’s a fact of life: you can’t please everyone, and if that were possible, then we would have achieved world peace. Since the dawn of time, humanity has evolved by finding ways to communicate information, ideas, and feelings. But for the later part, it has always remained a greater challenge.
For information, there are books: for ideas, there are documents, but feelings are, let's just say, still a feeling that has to be felt to be able to be understood.
Feelings are the very thing that makes our life complicated since it’s for the sake of experiencing a certain emotion that most of our actions are based on it. We want to feel happy even though our circumstances might not reflect that.
When you are having a bad weekend or feeling low, you still want to feel happy for at least an hour by either consuming a drug or a product to feel that void inside of you. We often forget that to be happy, we try too hard to please people but instead end up sad when our expectations aren’t met. So how do we try to maintain a happy life? Perhaps, these steps can be a start to that.
Stop Pleasing Your Self
By everyone, it includes you and your brain. First and foremost, we REALLY have to stop pleasing our brain. Just think about the root of all our unhappiness, and you’ll realize that most of them stem from your brain.
When we create appealing scenarios in our brain, there’s no denying most of them are megalomaniac like. In our heads, everything fits our biases and our expectations. We spend most of the time inside our heads. We know that what we call a heart is actually just some neurons firing inside the skull.
And reality doesn’t run in our whims; several factors affect the world and circumstances we come across due to which our expectations aren’t met. So, we HAVE to stop cramming pleasing scenarios inside of us without weighing logically first.
We’ll be happier when we start balancing realistic, achievable, and feasible scenarios in our current scenario. That way, we’ll be able to be in a state of lucid dream where most of the events are in our control. After all, a disorienting nightmare will only all add to vagueness in our life.
Stop Pleasing Your Makers
Who made you? Your mother, or maybe father or foster parent or an idol perhaps. We were all created by someone, an important figure or institution molded our thoughts, And most of the time, we feel a sense of responsibility that we owe a lot to our makers.
But the reality is we owe nothing to our makers, not even a cent or dime, let alone our time. It sounds a bit selfish, doesn’t it? Think of it this way; the rain owes nothing to the clouds, rivers owe nothing to the spring. All of us are simply doing what we were supposed to do, and the state of the cycle will continue as it always has.
There isn’t a single maker we owe anything to because each of our traits is a product of many people that played a huge role in shaping our thoughts. We are all but a product of one another, a product of ideas we refined as per our circumstances.
So, love fully, but don’t try to be appealing as it’ll never be enough for anyone and all of us have our own way to go.
Stop Pleasing Your Mates
We all have our own way to go, and so do our friends. When your friend marries, you’ll lose a friend, and marriage is a soul killer anyway. With a social construct like marriage, the spirit is meant to be a slave to being appealing.
Humans are good at noticing changes and even better at noticing the changes in someone close to us. So, in the case of friends, there’s no doubt that our colleagues will stray away from us with time when undesirable changes surround us.
Nostalgia is a sin in friendship because none of us can keep up the initial image in life that we started with. We are all evolving, and every one of us is merely an image someone built of us based on our characteristics; traits are chosen subjectively.
Friendship fades with time, and satisfying for the sake of the old bond is nothing but just an act of bringing band-aid to eliminate a cancer cell.
All we can do is to stop trying to please our friends. Instead, you have to adapt to changes by reminiscing the good old time and slowly letting go of them.
Stop Pleasing What You Love
All that you love has loved someone else and whatever loves you is nothing compared to the one you loved before. You’ll never be someone’s first, nor a last, and desires are an enigma, and the thirst is beyond our control.
We can’t be desirable to someone for too long, be it physically or emotionally. Our needs are mysterious, and no matter how much we give of ourselves to some time, they’ll only take what they want from us, and all the remaining is just in vain. When we try to please someone we love, we are just killing a part of us slowly.
There’s a misconception that we grow with pain, but we just kill part of ourselves in reality. Our “self” dies in the process, and all that is remaining is a hard shell that hides a soft spirit that’s left dead through suffocation. We end up in an illusion that the spirit is alive and well because we fail to look back by tearing that hard shell.
Thus, we have to please our soul and the hunger lurking inside of us because everyone else is just temporary like us. And all we have is ourselves, and we have to be good at giving company to ourselves and be desirable to our own self than others. When we can face ourselves, our thoughts in the shower, then maybe we can get somewhere when we wake up.
