Seriously, we are, we just tend to forget it all of us. Take our family, we are originally from Sweden. Swedes have never had to worry about healthcare, schools, day care, maternity/paternity leave, how to feed our kids and ourselves. Not really anyways, since there is always a safety net. We just have to remember that. We need to remember that no matter what, no matter how stressed we get about income, our kids, health, we always have a safety net. We will not go without proper medical care, without food and a home because the society we have created in Sweden takes care of us, like it or not. This makes us abundantly rich, in a world where most have so little.
For a while our family lived in the US and I got sick and my health care insurer decided to, out of the blue, terminate my coverage. All of a sudden we did worry, we worried a lot because it was expensive, it was tiring and stressful, for quite some time it remained so until we got things back on track. But for a while we were broke, we had no health care coverage, we had medical bills to pay, a son to feed and lots, lots of work to do, and no family to help. Being ill and not getting proper care is not a good way to live, and the worry makes all other issues grow, not necessarily in reasonable proportion. Stress makes everything so much harder and so much more difficult to deal with. But, no matter how hard things get we always know that as Swedes, we can always just move back to Sweden. We have our safety net, our cop out. We don’t want to live there permanently, and so far we have managed to get by on our own. We chose to live abroad, to pay for our own healthcare, the delivery of our son, for school and we chose to opt out of the Swedish maternity pay by not living there. It was our choice and the price we had to pay to get to live in the US, where we loved to live. Just the same it made us poor, in material terms. We lost all our savings and had to start over. The US, for all its good sides, is an extremely expensive, harsh country to get by in.
In our late thirties we wound up with no money, 100 k in credit card debt and in the middle of a (costly) adoption process. Life was hard; anxiety attacks, stress related, fear inducing panic attacks leaving us in the emergency room many times, crying fits, and uncertainty of where to go, what to do, how to do any of it! Being broke defines your life, making it sheer hell. But we pulled through. We are still not in the clear. We are still stressed, still tired, but we are working very hard to focus on the right things, on life, family, our son, living, rather than on what is not so good. We are also setting up a life that allows us to get things back on track rather than on falling back in the same old system, the same old stress that got us here in the first place.
So many of us complain about everything. And believe you me, I do get that things aren’t always easy, there are things to complain about, but after a while it gets monotonous. Yes, I hear you; your job sucks, yes your colleagues are dumb apes, yes you need to loose twenty pounds, yes you are tired of the gray skies, lack of sunlight, (the perpetual cold, gray skies of for example Sweden, that make me shudder just imagining them), yes, you are getting old, fast, your husband is a misogynist as, yes, no one appreciates you for the wonderful, fun, brilliant person you really are…. Or something like i, and I get it, but news flash, it is your life. If you don’t like it, change it. So stop the never ending rants and change what you do not like. Start by acknowledging that one: you are so seriously lucky, you have the basics met, the bases of the Maslow’s pyramid are laid, and two: you are in fact free to do what you want, you can do what you want and it is not too late to change whatever it is that is not working. First, do understand, on a deep level, that no one can do it for you. Stop complaining, start digging yourself up of whatever hole you are in by focusing on what you want and need to change to achieve peace.
If you chose to remain where you are, with the same old, same old that keeps you down and unhappy, the same old that you keep complaining about, then accept it and shut up. If not, change whatever you are unhappy about. Isn’t life just a tad too short to be stuck and unhappy?
