What if you are already living your best possible life? Not the nicest one. The best one available, because it is the only one that happened.
We play what if all day. If the accident had not happened, if the appointment had not been missed, life would have been perfect. You do not know that. I could have been an idiot who killed somebody in a car two months later. You cannot run the other version, so you are comparing your real life to a life you invented. And there is no DeLorean. Twenty toilet seats in a shop and I still cannot pick the right one, so I am not sure I would trust my alternative timeline anyway.
One thing to try: Catch one what if today. Notice you are comparing a real thing to a thing you made up.
In this episode
(1:15) What my blood pressure actually does
(3:11) I could have been an idiot who killed somebody
(4:12) We play the what if game all the time
(8:03) If that had not happened, we would have been on time
(9:14) The lowest point, and what I do not know about it
(11:43) Twenty choices and I cannot pick one
(12:48) A wall of toilet seats, including see through ones
(13:58) Without a DeLorean you cannot change this moment
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Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
What if you are already living your best possible life?
Not the nicest one available. The best one available, because it is the only one that actually happened.
The heart of it
You are comparing your real life to a life you invented and cannot check.
The alternative you are grieving might have been considerably worse.
Too much choice makes us miserable about the thing we already picked.
People tell me I would have been successful if I had not broken my neck. Maybe. I was eighteen, I drove far too fast and I thought I was indestructible. I could have killed somebody two months later and spent the next decade in prison.
I am not saying that would have happened. I am saying neither of us knows, and only one of us is certain.
There is a good demonstration of this in politics. When a government handles something badly you can see it, because other countries did better and you have something to compare against. But imagine every country had handled it well and the worldwide death toll had been tiny. Nobody would have had anything to compare it to, so all anybody would talk about is the wrecked economy and the jobs, and the people who saved all those lives would be voted out for it.
You only ever see the road you took.
Same with the traffic jam. You are certain that without it you would have been on time and the day would have gone perfectly. Or you would have been two miles further on at exactly the wrong moment, and you would never have known the jam saved you.
My lowest point was not caused by my life being bad. It was caused by having a picture in my head of the life I was supposed to be living. Married, settled, never dating again, sorted. I was so busy with that version that I was not looking after the real one.
And here is the small proof. Close your eyes. Put yourself on a beach, waves coming in, sun on your face, birds. Now open them. Are you on a beach?
If you are now miserable about not being on a beach, that is the whole mechanism in four seconds.
One small thing to try
Catch yourself mid what if, and finish the sentence honestly.
If that had not happened, then what? You do not know. There is no DeLorean and there is no way to run the other version.
Then look at the one you have, which is the only one on offer today, and ask what you are going to do with it.
Questions people ask
Is it wrong to want things?
Not at all. I like concerts and books and music and I intend to keep wanting them. The problem is not preference. It is standing in your actual life comparing it unfavourably to an imaginary one.
Why does choice make it worse?
Because every option you did not take stays available in your head. I once went to buy a toilet seat, expecting to be five minutes, and found a wall of them in more colours than exist in nature. Some were see through. I came out with a plain white one and I am still not certain.
Is this just making the best of things?
It is narrower than that. It is noticing that the comparison you keep running is against something that does not exist, so you have been losing an argument with nobody.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
In this episode
acceptance · gratitude · disability
Read the transcript
Hey, welcome to my podcast, Stillness in the Storms. I'm Steven Webb, your host, sometimes known as the Inner Peace
Guy, because I help people have a little inner peace. For this podcast, I want to convince you that you're
already living your best possible life.
Yeah, really. You know, me, seer, paralysed, I can't walk, my arms have got limited function, I've got a bit
of a sore throat at the moment. And I'm now going to convince you that I'm already living my best
possible life.
Really? Yep. Let's dive in.
So, okay, before my accident, if anybody had come and said to me that your life's going to end up
paralysed and you're not going to walk and you're going to have all these problems, you're going to have autonomic
dysreflexia, which, in short, is a life-threatening condition, that if something goes wrong below my level of injury.
So an ingrown toenail or um I need the toilet or I some,
I don't know, a pressure on my knee or something like that that's hurting me and causing me pain or
discomfort. It sends my blood pressure really, really high. And I'm not talking like 140 over 110
or something. I'm talking like in the 200s, over 140, 150, like excruciating headache pain um
where I go kind of blue. I start to sweat down one side. And if it isn't dealt with within
about 15, 20 minutes, there is a possibility of a stroke or even worse. And that can
happen virtually any time to me um And it happens, I don't know, a couple of times a month normally.
And my carers brilliantly just deal with it and everything's fine afterwards. And I'm
here sitting there thinking, well, am I really living the best possible version of my life? Well, okay, I could
be rich, I could be famous, I could be a movie star. I could be a humble, I don't know,
Baker with a large family, living in a really big home. I could be,
I don't know, a police officer. I could be anything, you know. But what am I? I'm a city councillor
and I quite enjoy doing that. I'm a mindfulness and meditation coach and I help people with that um
I'm a dad.
I was gonna say I'm a partner. I'm not at the moment, you know, I'm single, I have a roof
over my head, I have enough money to pay my bills. 50 of the time, I would say I.
But am I really living the best Possible version of my life.
Yes. And here's why look
people often say something like, well, I can see you has been really successful if you hadn't broke your neck
say Well I did break my neck. And you don't know, I could have been a real asshole and I
could have ended up two months later killing someone in a car and ended up in prison.
Yeah, but I don't think that would have happened to you. Well, you don't know, because I did drive rather
fast. I thought I was invincible. I was 18 years old, you know, I was doing dumb ass things I
wasn't caring about people. I wasn't. I was just caring about my. My kicks, my gratification. You
know, what happens if I did something worse, where I might have gone into, I don't know, some trade and
made a mistake and ended up killing lots of people? Or what if I ended up finding out that I
had a wonderful music voice, which I haven't.
But what happens if somebody liked my dosset tones? I don't know, my monotone? There's some bad music out there
somewhere. What if I ended up, you know, inventing something and becoming incredibly be rich Here's the thing. We play
these what if games all the time. The truth is, I don't know what all the alternatives were. I have
no idea, because we would never live them. We don't get the chance to live them. So while we're thinking
about the alternative as something wonderful and amazing, it may not have been. So when we start to
realise that, well, my alternative may not be great. It's like when we have a general election. You take
now with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in the UK. They're both Republican and Conservative, which is quite right-wing
both of them.
And their handling of this COVID-19 crisis has been pretty bad. And you can say
it's been pretty bad because you can look at Germany and New Zealand and even Italy and Spain, where they
had a real big problem to begin with. They're really coping and the deaths are. And the infection rates are
massively down compared to us and America So we can say that they could
have handled this better. Now then, let's say Trump did not win the election and it was now the
Democrats and the Hillary Clinton was in power, let's say, because they're more left-wing and more socialists
um They close down the government, they closed or closed down the shops, they closed down the economy
and locked down everybody. But they only lost 5 000 people
And we closed down this country and we lost 2 000 people
Meanwhile, we've destroyed the economies because every country in the world's destroyed their economies. There isn't one economy that's
thriving right now.
But because we didn't see the alternative, the Democrats and Jeremy Corbyn the labor would be finished in this country
right now. They wouldn't be able to that coming the November election in America, the
Republicans would get in a massive majority because no one would have seen the alternative. No one would have known
what would have happened if Trump had gone in So
we tend to see the alternative through rose tinted glasses. What if Hillary was in with a lot less deaths.
Well, you wouldn't have had a lot well You would have had a lot less deaths, but you wouldn't have
known you had less deaths because you wouldn't have known the alternative. We do have the gift at the moment
of other countries messing it up so we can compare. But what if every country done incredibly well
and
we only had 80 000 deaths in the whole world?
Think about that for a moment. Every single country locked down and we destroyed the world's economies, businesses went under,
everything went terribly wrong economically, but it went really well. Regarding we managed to squash it,
maybe even just 10 000 deaths worldwide.
We wouldn't have any country or anywhere to compare ourselves to to say we did a good job. Instead, everybody
would be screaming about the economy, about their jobs, about all the other things because they wouldn't know of how
bad it could have been.
You see where I'm going? We don't know that the alternative would necessarily be better. But
when we're running late in the car, driving somewhere and someone cuts us up or someone stops us in
our journey or doesn't let us out and we end up late for the appointment, we're pissed off, we're mad,
we're annoyed. Because if that didn't happen, we think we'd be on time for the appointment, we wouldn't be stressed,
we wouldn't get anxious, I wouldn't have missed that bargain or whatever reason. We look at it as we would
have been on time and everything would have worked out perfect. Well, that's just bs. No, we don't know. Everything
would have worked out perfect. What
if that traffic jam has saved you from a terrible accident, but
you would never have known that accident would have existed without the traffic jam.
You know, it really is that um looking through our alternative through roasting to
glass illnesses So
if I sit here and look at my life right now and I constantly think that my other
life, the one in my head, the one I imagine would be better, I'm going to Be miserable. If
I think that if my long-term partner hadn't cheated on me, I'd be miserable. Well, if they hadn't cheated on
me would be living happily ever after. No, I wouldn't have had other girlfriends. I wouldn't have had ever fun
would I?
You know, perhaps I would have stayed with that other person and lived happily ever after we don't know. That's
the point. And when I hit the lowest point in my life, I was at the lowest point in my
life. Not because my life was bad, but
it was because I had in my mind an alternative of what I thought it was going to be. I
was going to get married, live happily ever after, never have to date again, never have to get. I had
my perfect partner, my perfect life, my perfect, perfect scenario And
truth was, it wasn't perfect at all. But it was the one I had. And I wasn't looking after the
one I had. I
was so focused on other alternatives, other versions. The grass is green on the other side. It isn't
water, the grass on your side. You
know the the alternative of not breaking my neck is not necessarily better. The
alternative of not having uprising and riots is not always better. If this bad thing did not
happen, life would have been perfect. Well, that's just, it's just an illusion way of thinking.
It
doesn't work. You
know, the truth is we don't have a magic time machine. We cannot go back and change it. We cannot
sample the alternative. You know we we're miserable now partly because we have too much choice.
I go in a supermarket and I see all the toothpaste and I'm like, okay, I gotta decide. Do I
want minty fresh breath, white breath? Do I want foaming toothpaste? Do I want little beads in it? Do I
want it in a long tube, a stand-up tube? Do I want it in eco packaging or not? Do I
want charcoal in it? And I'm like, oh, come on, I don't no why can't we just have three toothpaste
Expensive whitening and something else. Look after your gums, make it easy.
Because when there's three to five items, I can make a reasonable decision to which one
I think is the right choice for me. But when there's 20 or 30, I'm like, I can't make the
right choice for me. So then when we come away with the picture we bought or the wallpaper we chose
the carpet, the insurance premium we just took out, you know, the toothpaste we just bought,
we're looking at alternatives, thinking, well, maybe that one was good. Maybe just that one, maybe. So we're not even
happy with what we're buying now. You
know, I was on the way over to my partners at one point and I said to her, you know,
your toilet seat is broken. And she goes, yeah. I said, I'll pick one up on the way over. And
she goes, okay. I just thought it'd be easy. I thought literally I could go to the store, say to
my carer, pop in, get a toilet seat, about 20 quid. And she went in. You're gonna have to come
in with me. I was like, why? I just want a toilet seat. Oh, you're gonna have to come in
with me. There's a choice of everything. So you went in there. There was a wall of toilet seats. I
mean, literally, there was more colored toilet seats than there is colours in the spectrum, I'm sure of it. And
not only that, they had toilet seats that were see-through So you decide on a colour, then you got the
material. Oh, wait a minute. A wooden one. That'd be warm on my bum. I'll go for that one oh
wait a minute it's porous oh wait a minute. It's the little more money Ah. She hasn't got nothing else
wood in a room So take the wooden one out. Oh, plastic one. Yeah, but that'd be cold. Okay. Oh,
I. Yeah, I picked up just a white one. That's the end of that story. I literally was paralysed by
choice. And
that's the problem. Now we're looking at our lives in a way that we're seeing lots of different alternatives.
That if I bought that car, if I said yes to that person, if I messaged that person, if I
stayed with that person, you know, you don't have all those alternatives. Once
you made the decision Once you're in, once this moment has arised you don't have the privilege. Without a DeLorean,
you don't have the privilege of changing this moment. You
know, if you think you can change this moment, do this for me. Just take a deep breath,
close your eyes. Imagine yourself on a nice beach. The waves coming in, the waves going
out.
And as we're aware of our breath and the waves happening and the lovely beach with the sun on your
face, the birds in the sky. Now
open your eyes. Are you on the beach? No.
No. The point is, if we're going to be now miserable because we're not on the beach,
that's why we're. That's why we're Struggling because in our minds, we want to be live in a certain way.
We open our eyes and we're not living that way, so we're miserable.
This is why you are living the best possible version of your life right now. Because if you
embrace that, you'll stop looking for alternatives. You'll
stop looking for the wonderful, magic life that's going to be happy for you. You'll stop longing and
the desiring a difference. It's okay to have preferences for what you want in this life.
I like to go to concerts I I like intimacy. I like having fun. I like reading a good book.
I like music. Nothing wrong with having those desires
and enjoy them, embrace them. But don't constantly look at your life and see that I should have lived a
different life. I should have stayed with that person. I should have, should have, should have. It'll just make you
miserable. It will just just drain you. So
accept this moment and go, do you know what? The thinner version, the richer, the healthier, the one that's
living in a different country, none of them are possible right now.
The only life possible right now is the one you have sitting here listening to this podcast. That's it.
None of the other are available to you.
None of them.
So embrace and accept this one and do what you will with this one, rather than denying this one and
trying to live some other life.
I'm Steven Webb and thank you for listening to my podcast. I hope you subscribe and I'd love
to hear from you. Head over there and click on the Contact Me. I'd love to know what you think
of my podcast. So if you've seen this on Facebook or anywhere else, you know, just connect with me.
Connect with me. And then I'm just interested is this change the way you see life? Does it change your
perspective on things? The thing is, the alternative is not always better. The
alternative could be a lot worse. Stop trying to live there.
Anyway, take care. Namaste, and thank you for listening to my podcast. You can head over to my website,
StevenWebb.com and start your journey to a little more inner peace. Take care, guys. Namaste.
