What’s your current Netflix series? The game you’re playing on your Xbox or Playstation? That thing, that at the end of a long, crazy busy day you automatically put on so you can switch off?
We are currently watching Game of Thrones (again!) & Fifa, even after all these years, is still my go to game!
None of this is bad - I mean, some of those Netflix series’ I’ve seen advertised certainly look it and when I get beat on Fifa with a last minute deflection it can feel like that, but it’s good to relax and enjoy some entertainment.
The problem, however, comes when we turn into robots, stuck in routines that don’t give us anything, but just allow us to escape our reality for a little longer.
While these things are all demanding our attention and attendance, more and more people are turning to it for dependance. Something it isn’t designed to ever offer us - and therefore it lets us down when the problems we face still exist after it, or it offers us nothing more than a short burst of joy.
There’s a film I’ll save you from watching called Hector & the Search for Happiness. Simon Pegg stars as a man on a mission to figure out how he can be happy - trying a few things to no luck.
And at the end it concludes with this quote - ‘avoiding unhappiness is not the road to happiness’.
It took a long film to get there, and it seems like something so simple, and yet it’s so profound.
If you want to be happy, don’t live a life stuck in a routine that only aims to avoid unhappiness.
You see if I spend all of my time trying to avoid unhappiness, and the disappointments I feel in real life, then all I do is end up numbing myself to what it means to actually be happy.
Explorers then, don’t simply try and escape or avoid unhappiness thinking it’ll make them happy, they are willing adventurers who go on a journey of discovery embracing the ups and downs of it all, and in doing so experience true happiness.
Put simply - don’t spend so much of your time avoiding the unhappiness you feel, that you forget to go on a journey to discover what it means to be actually happy - even if that requires you to walk through difficulty.
For me, my faith has been an adventure embracing life in all its fullness, discovering love and my value and finding joy even in some of the hardest parts of my life.
But don’t take my word for it, put down the remote or the controller (not in the middle of a game), stop trying to escape and avoid unhappiness and explore true happiness for yourself…