Hello once more, friend!
Quick question.
If you could choose a life with absolutely no problems, would you take it?
No stress.
No heartbreak.
No money problems.
No arguments.
No unexpected phone calls that somehow begin with:
“So... something happened.”
Sounds pretty good.
For about five minutes.
Because I think a life without problems would eventually become a problem of its own.
You probably do not actually want a life with no problems.
You want a life with problems you can handle.
That is a very different thing.
Not Every Problem Deserves a Meeting
Something changes as you get older.
You slowly realize that not everything deserves your full emotional budget.
When you are younger, every problem feels enormous.
One awkward conversation?
Disaster.
Someone does not reply?
Clearly the collapse of civilization.
One bad week?
Your entire life is apparently heading in the wrong direction.
Then enough things happen.
Real things.
People leave.
Plans fail.
Money disappears.
Relationships change.
You lose people you thought would always be there.
And suddenly the Wi-Fi being slow does not quite carry the same philosophical weight.
You start asking a better question:
Can I do something about this?
If yes, do it.
If not, perhaps do not give it a penthouse in your brain.
Problems Do Not RSVP
Life has terrible manners.
Problems rarely arrive at convenient times.
Nobody sends:
Dear Yassine,
We would like to schedule a minor personal crisis for Thursday at 3:30 p.m.
Please confirm availability.
They just appear.
You can be sitting comfortably with a glass of hot mint tea while rain hits the window, thinking:
You know what?
Maybe life is actually going pretty well.
And then—
something breaks.
The car.
The laptop.
A relationship.
Your plans.
Your confidence.
Sometimes all of them seem to coordinate.
And suddenly you are staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. asking the traditional human questions:
Why am I here?
What am I doing?
Where is any of this going?
And why is my Wi-Fi still this terrible?
The classics.
Your Crisis Is Real. It Is Also Probably Not Unique.
This sounds harsh, but I find it strangely comforting.
Most of the things that make us feel completely alone have happened to millions of people before us.
Heartbreak?
Very popular.
Failure?
Huge market.
Feeling lost?
Practically a human tradition.
Thinking everyone else has figured life out while you are improvising?
Almost certainly universal.
Your pain can be real without being unique.
And sometimes realizing that makes it slightly easier to carry.
You are not the only person stumbling through this strange thing.
Everybody is improvising.
Some people are simply better dressed while doing it.
Being Smart Does Not Mean Solving Everything
There is a strange trap in being able to analyze things.
You start believing everything can be solved if you think about it long enough.
Some problems can.
Great.
Think harder.
Research.
Make a plan.
Try something.
But other problems do not have neat solutions.
Sometimes someone leaves.
Sometimes something ends.
Sometimes you make the wrong decision.
Sometimes life simply says:
No.
And there is no hidden productivity system that fixes it.
Intelligence helps you understand what happened.
But understanding something does not automatically give you control over it.
Sometimes being smart means solving the problem.
Sometimes being smart means realizing:
This one is not mine to solve.
The Way It Goes
Kurt Vonnegut had a wonderfully simple phrase:
“So it goes.”
Three words.
Almost annoyingly simple.
But I understand why they stick.
Something happens.
So it goes.
Something ends.
So it goes.
Something works beautifully for six months and then decides to explode on a random Tuesday.
So it goes.
It does not mean you stop caring.
It does not mean pain does not matter.
It just means life keeps moving whether you have finished processing what happened or not.
There is something brutal about that.
There is also something comforting about it.
Most Disasters Become Stories Eventually
Think about some of the worst little days you have had.
Your car breaks down the week money is already tight.
Your boss develops a mysterious passion for 8 a.m. meetings.
You spill something on the one shirt you actually like five minutes before leaving.
You send a message to the wrong person.
You deploy something.
It breaks.
Of course it breaks.
At the time, none of this is funny.
Six months later?
Some of it becomes hilarious.
That is one of the stranger things about time.
It takes events that felt unbearable and quietly turns them into stories.
Not everything.
Some things stay painful.
But a surprising amount of life eventually becomes:
You will not believe what happened to me that day.
Which makes me wonder how many things I am currently stressing about will eventually become a story I tell while laughing.
Misery Is a Terrible Roommate
There is a difference between having a problem and letting that problem move into your house.
At first, it is just visiting.
Then suddenly it is eating your food.
Sleeping on your couch.
Using your Netflix account.
And somehow making decisions.
You wake up thinking about it.
You carry it into work.
You bring it into conversations that have nothing to do with it.
You ignore good moments because your mind is still sitting somewhere else.
That is the dangerous part.
The problem has stopped being an event.
It has become the lens through which you see everything.
Sometimes you need to step outside your own head for a while.
Walk somewhere.
Call somebody.
Exercise.
Make something.
Eat.
Sleep.
Do something aggressively normal.
Not because the problem disappeared.
Just because your entire life is bigger than whatever is currently going wrong.
You Are Not the Main Character of the Universe
Bad news.
The universe is not particularly interested in your character development.
Rain is not symbolic.
Traffic is not a test from destiny.
The waiter probably did not forget your order because Mercury is in retrograde.
Sometimes things just happen.
And weirdly, I find that freeing.
You do not need to interpret everything.
Not every inconvenience contains a lesson.
Not every failure is secretly preparing you for greatness.
Sometimes you missed the train because you left late.
That is the whole story.
But while you may not be the main character of the universe, you are still the person responsible for your little corner of it.
That part matters.
You cannot control everything that happens.
You do get some say in what happens next.
Maybe the Goal Is Better Problems
I do not think the goal of life is to eliminate problems.
You solve one and another appears.
Get a better job?
Now you have harder responsibilities.
Start a relationship?
Lovely.
Now you have relationship problems.
Build a business?
Congratulations.
You have unlocked business problems.
Buy a house?
Wonderful.
The roof would like a word.
Every improvement seems to come with a new category of inconvenience.
Maybe that is fine.
Maybe progress is not reaching a place where nothing goes wrong.
Maybe progress is looking back and realizing:
The problems I have today are problems an earlier version of me would have been proud to have.
That changes the question.
Instead of:
How do I get rid of all my problems?
Maybe ask:
Which problems are worth having?
So, the Way It Goes
Things will go wrong.
People will disappoint you.
You will disappoint yourself.
You will make brilliant decisions.
You will make unbelievably stupid ones.
Sometimes within the same hour.
You will lose things.
Find things.
Build things.
Break things.
Fix some of them.
Leave others broken.
And life will continue being completely unreasonable about the whole arrangement.
So maybe the trick is not becoming someone who never struggles.
Maybe it is becoming someone who can look at a problem and think:
Can I fix this?
Can I learn from it?
Can I laugh at it?
Can I turn it into a story?
And if the answer to all four is no...
maybe I just let it pass.
So it goes.
Much love,
Yassine Erradouani