| Hindsight living, is like hindsight investing (I should have bought Apple stock in 1999) useless. With hindsight it's easy to cherry-pick missteps. And from those missteps fantasize a hypothetical outcome. And obviously in this alternate universe you only ever come out better. Yes, there are pivotal moments. I've made big decisions along the way. I've made some mistakes. But everything good in my life has come from this one path. I make a choice to celebrate the present, not hanker after a mythical alternative. I choose to be content with the present, and contentment is the source of my happiness. It's easy to compare my life with others, and find others richer, or more famous, or married, or unmarried. Social media amplifies this. But it's also easy to compare to others who walked a harder path, and have a harder path in front of them. At this stage of my life its less about climbing one more rung, and more about helping those below me, smoothing their path as much as possible. No one goes through life perfectly. Hindsight living is not helpful and contentment beats regret every day of the week. |
Others placed something like "fear-based paralysis" and I get it, but when you're responsible for making that transition between poverty and minimum affluence, you start to develop a "defensive-based proneness to action" instead.
For instance, since I was quite bit ambitious to get out of my past situation, at least for me most of my decisions were made thinking in some factors like: - Do not get involved in situations where I can get murdered (doing something stupid myself or getting into other people's path that can lead me to be murdered) - Avoid any situations in which I could end up in jail - Avoid having children without any financial and societal conditions - Avoid any drugs - Avoid any error that could impact my net worth more than 5%
Living in a world of avoidance is not pleasant, most of the time, it sucks, and the feedback loop is sometimes so subtle that you need to exercise your mind to think in the future most of the time.
I have a happy life today, because I saw some of those things happen to some close friends, and there's no comeback from those. Sometimes you can find contentment in some other areas of your life, but if you have a certain level of ambition, you will never recover.