Do you ever feel you’re living a wasted life? If you only have one life to live, why not make it the most incredible life possible?
Making the most out of life seems like an obvious conclusion, but like many things, it’s easier said than done. Great things often come at the risk of negative side effects and sadly many people are turned off by the possibility of having to deal with something difficult. It seems that fear can actually lead to a wasted life.
When people are too afraid to leave their comfort zones they end up miss out on fantastic parts of life they could very well be experiencing. When you look back on your life, one sprained ankle will be well worth the numerous adventures you’ve had.
Though it seems easier to protect yourself from the world, you will end up regretting wasting your life. Here are five signs you should look out for, as well as what to do when you spot them.
1. You’ve never been in love
Without at least one good love story, life seems like a bit of a waste. Allowing yourself to fall in love means letting your guard down and inviting the risk of heartbreak into your life. This sounds really scary but, what’s even scarier is living your whole life without even knowing the magical feeling of being in love!
Make a list of qualities you are looking for in a partner and when you find someone who comes close, give it a try! Sure it will be difficult at timesbut if you have a good support system outside of your relationship, in the form of friends and or family, you will be okay.
2. You’ve never left the country before
Leaving your home country for the first time can be very scary, especially if no one in your family or circle of friends has much experience with it. You may have to speak a language you don’t know well, get lost by yourself, or, god forbid…lose your luggage! However, what you will gain from traveling will heavily outweigh any cons.
You will open your mind, try amazing food and of course obtain some bragging rights. If you have always dreamed of traveling but are nervous to take the plunge, try going with someone you know who has experience or join a tour. It’s important to remember leaving the country isn’t the only way to feed your mind through travel either.
If you don’t have the necessary fundsat the moment, take weekend trips to new cities nearby. Exploring someplace three hours away can still be a great life adventure.
3. You don’t have any hobbies you’re passionate about
In addition to a career, most people have some hobbies they are truly passionate about whether it’s playing an instrument, a sport or even studying a language. If you can’t name one thing you really enjoy doing, outside of work, you are going to end up leading a less fulfilling life…possibly a wasted life.
If this sounds like you and you just don’t know what you like, don’t worry, it’s a great excuse to try some new things out in efforts of discovering yourself and finding meaning in life. Try joining in every activity that your friends and family do and see if anything interests you.
4. You let other’s opinions dictate your decisions
If you live to make others happy, you are not living your life to the fullest. A life not lived to the fullest is almost equivalent to a wasted life. It’s important to have others respect you but not crucial to have everyone like you. What your peers think of you seems important at the moment but later on, you will hardly remember and you will regret letting those unmemorable situations hold you back. No matter what you do in life, there will be some who agree and some who do not. If the outcome is more or less the same anyway, you might as well live your life exactly how you want.
Only take other’s advice seriously within reason. When someone thinks that you should change something, take some time to consider it, and if you come to the conclusion that you disagree with their opinion, let it go. Accept that this person thinks differently than you or in other words, agree to disagree. You are the boss of your life and only you can make your own decisions.
5. You spend more than an hour on social media a day
Social media can be fun, convenient and even addicting. Facebook and Twitter are great platforms to use for simple communication or short brain breaks from work, however, many people don’t know when to cut themselves off. If you are normally on social media for multiple hours a day you are literally wasting your life as there are so many more exciting things you could be doing with your time.
If ripping yourself away from the phoneis hard, it’s a good idea to delete any social media applications so that you must manually log in on your browser. Also, try making a pact with a friend to do more outdoor activities together. You’ll be much happier looking back on memories of camping or trips to the beach rather than sitting on your couch posting images to Pinterest.
One day you will be truly thankful to yourself for finally leaving your comfort zone. If you are able to look back on your life and recall memories of love and travel rather than Facebook and Netflix, you can say you haven’t got a wasted life.
The five signs one is, unknowingly, living a wasted life need a sixth . . . continuing to live in adulthood as the child affected by parental alienation (“PA” — one parent, as the perpetrator, turning his or her children of the marriage or union against their other parent. It is one of the worst forms of child abuse known to man that so damages the psyche of the children that they honestly believe they have good reasons for hating, disrespecting, mistreating and abandoning their other parent, sometimes for the rest of their lives, and leaves them with monumental, impossible-to-live-with regret.
Happy people have two things in common: they (1) have no quarrel against anyone and they (2) want others to be happy. Children who hang onto as adults, and carry into their roles as spouse and parent the hate, anger and disdain in their hearts can never be happy. Not only that, but the damage done to them is bleeding into the next generation through them. Children learn what they see and what they live. If mom hates her mother, maybe moms, in general, are unimportant and irrelevant, so hurting them doesn’t matter or maybe a child believes he or she can’t know grandparents and aunts and uncles because he or she is not worthy of those relationships.’
But those children are years and years away from knowing and understanding that their parent had been seriously damaged by one parent to the point of being a different person and never being able to become the person he or she was meant to be. As adults, children of PA have compromised or abandoned all the decent values and principles with which they were raised to have in order to continuing hating and mistreating the target parent. Because the alienating parent has denied them permission to love their other parent (something all children of divorce need), they believe that loving or relating to or even just being decent toward the target parent is a huge betrayal, that they are betraying the alienating parent, even after that parent has died or been gone for years.
Because, as adults, children of PA have become incapable of empathy, compassion, understanding, forgiveness, consideration, or fairness toward the target parent, it is likely they are incapable of expressing these qualities in other situations toward other people. This means that, though they are convinced they are in the right — they are not only wasting their respective lives, each has, him or herself, become a waste — a person who has little or nothing to contribute, who is spreading and continuing the collateral damage and unspeakable pain begun by their alienating parent.
A heart filled with anger is unable to love others as they deserve to be loved. The hate, anger and disdain they try to keep buried day after day will always surface without warning in unexpected, and usually undesirable and inconvenient, situations. Because it takes more energy and effort to remain angry and hateful, they are robbing themselves of energy they could use more productively. It it’s mom who’s being hated and mistreated, the male children may find it difficult to marry or even maintain an intimate relationship because any intelligent, emotionally stable young woman knows that how a man treats his mother indicates how he’ll probably treat her. The same is true for female children of PA when the hated parent is dad.
As parents,will they be able to help their children learn to cope with adveraity and difficulties in relationships when they have made no effort to learn how to cope with what happened to them. I mean, children abused by PA don’t need that knowledge in order to know something in them and their lives isn’t right. All they need is a little common sense to know that harboring and responding to that much hate, anger and disdain toward one parent but not the other when there’s no outrageous physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse by that parent in childhood to which they can point. So, all children abused by PA should be able to see something is terribly wrong and that having a life of inner peace and contentment does NOT mean not loving the alienating parent, but it does require facing and accepting the truth of what happened and what was done to them, so they can re-build a critical relationship in their lives, so they can enjoy both parents and share them with their own children.
The only reason for not doing this is if the target parents is too hurt or too angry to participate in the rebuilding, but even that situation doesn’t preclude nor negate the necessity of facing and accepting the truth.
Living a lie always wastes one’s life. One doesn’t need any of the other five situations to be part of his or her life. Not repairing the damage and unspeakable pain of PA is enough to totally waste one’s life and one’s entire self.
Those offering the opportunity to comment need to also offer an edit feature. Some of us care about our writing and correcting mistakes, which I find my comment has. For one thing, corrections can be critically important for making sure readers have a clear and accurate understanding of what is being said.
It’s also important for the benefit of those educated in the U.S. by our post-1966 inadequate education system, so that good, mistake-free writing can reinforce what they were taught and/or learned correctly while also providing others with an opportunity to improve and correct their own writing thanks to the help of correct examples from which they can continue to learn. We know from all the mediocre and poor writing on the Internet, and from difficulties retail employees encounter and cannot resolve with their inadequate comprehension and limited knowledge, that too many graduates of that system have gaps of varying degrees and severity n their knowledge, comprehension, writing and cognitive skills.
Since I seem to be obsessed with correcting my work, I feel compelled to advise readers that, in the 1st paragraph of my comment, it should read “a child affected” instead of “the child affected.” Second, “adversity” is misspelled and, in the second to last paragraph, it should read: “target parent is too,” NOT “target parents is too.”
Please add the ability to edit after posting and spread the word to other sites or, at the very least, notify us in advance that editing after posting is NOT available. Thank you.
Thank you! Perfectly said!