Why we are all prone to take advice that will lead to our own unhappiness?

We all do this to some extent. We try and pick and choose the worst sounding advice of everything we hear. The reason for this is the belief that if you want to achieve happiness, everyone would do X, right? So if a person A has tried X and the result is unhappiness, they’ll tell everyone not to try X because it sucked. All good, but if they always wanted to do Y…

It FEELS smart to take the counterproductive advice.

Here’s an example:

Marriage

Todd has always wanted to get married. He’s 16 years old, but unlike all the other guys, he wants to get married. Bright-eyed, he tells his uncle John that he envies John for his 15th anniversary, and that one day, he wishes to have been married for that long, too. John cannot let the youngster’s enthusiasm take the better of him, and advised him that marriage is a trap. It’s awful. Don’t go there. All it does is to disappoint you and suck your life out of you. John thinks all men are alike, they all just want to play the field like he would have wanted to, before the baby put a ball and a chain on him.

Disheartened, Todd fears he’s been embarrasingly naive, hardens himself up and decided never to get married. Never to get a girl near his heart. He plays the field, learns every trick in the book, and by 40, he’s the biggest womanizer in this world. His liver is failing, however.

A young man, Scott, bright-eyed, comes to talk to him by the bar. He tells him he admires Todd because Todd has spent his life unaffected by the societal pressure to get married. “One day,” he declares “I want to be like you, free and young still, regretting nothing.”

Todd cannot let the young man’s naivety get the better of him and he advises him to forget such foolishness. Life on the fast lane is far from amazing. It is empty and cold, and you never get to experience the love of a good woman. “Get married, young Scott!”

And young Scott becomes uncle John.

You know yourself better at 17 than you do at 30

You knew what you wanted to experience at 17, didn’t you? You might have decided to take the “safe route” and follow the advice of your elders. After all, if it sounds SO BAD, they must know something about life that you don’t know yet, right? So embarrassed, we put our “naive” dreams aside and don’t go after them.

Instead, the young men who always wanted to be firefighters are happy being firefighters. The womanizers who always wanted to be womanizers are happy. (If they’re still alive. I think Hugh Hefner did fine for himself.) The men who always wanted to get married are… Hopefully happy. Conditions apply. Some men marry thinking all women want a certain kind of a marriage, and that may put them in a harm’s way… Always when we assume something about ANOTHER PERSON we run a risk of making an ass out of ourselves and our lives.

The takeaways

However, the point of this post is this: You know what you want, and you can have it, as long as you don’t assume everyone else around you wants the same thing. (You have to find the right people to achieve that dream with if it requires a partner.)

I want to give you this thought: You will always sleep easier with the bad choices YOU MADE for yourself than the choices you made because someone else told you to… When you knew better… while you’ll never know what could have been if you had had the courage to go after what you wanted.

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