Don’t Take Life So Seriously, It Doesn’t Take You Seriously Either

Taking life seriously is goofy.

Look at us with our grumpy faces, lack of humor, 101 problems, and our desire to “make it” in the world.

Seriously, is there anything more goofy than that?

Sometimes it’s time to look at children for some wisdom.

As a child, the world was your playground and all you wanted to do was have fun and enjoy and make a mess. Sure, sometimes you cried but it was easy for you to snap out of it.

The older you got the more serious you became. Suddenly, there were serious issues to consider. Suddenly, there were more important things than being full of joy and having fun.

Until, eventually, you become a grownup. Now, joy and having fun are secondary to living a serious and responsible life.

If you look around, a good definition of being an adult means realizing that life is not supposed to be fun and joy.

A lot of the seriousness comes from hardened beliefs about life and ourselves.

But perhaps having the flexibility of a brick wall is not a sign of maturity.

Maybe digging your heels in and never looking beyond your one-dimensional view of life is not a heightened stage of development. Maybe it’s stunted development.

Instead of growing up, we are growing in — into a cocoon that is, which we keep fortifying with more layers of beliefs.

But the good news is that a cocoon always harbors the possibility of a butterfly. So it’s never too late to break out of the encrusted shell and meet life without the fear-based buffer of unquestioned assumptions.

As a child, you might have looked at all the grownups and wondered what the heck is wrong with them. Why do they look like life is a burden?

Now, being a grownup yourself you might have realized that it’s easy to get caught up in the holy grind of life.

Also, as grownups, we notoriously tend to believe our own bullshit.

Of course that doesn’t mean that being a grownup should mean having lots of candy, playing all day, and never eating broccoli.

That might be the idea of a perfect life for a child but not for an adult. No matter how much we yearn for the simplicity of our childhood there are some things we are supposed to outgrow.

And although this outgrowing happens in a lot of ways, we’re also ingrowing in a lot of other ways. What I mean is that we believe that having strong beliefs, convictions, opinions, and viewpoints is a sign of maturity.

While none of that is wrong in itself, it’s not a far step from mature to moldy. And moldy is what we become when we hold on to our cherished notions too tightly instead of developing beyond them.

We believe we have to be this, do that, and have the other. We believe that all our problems are very important and deserve all the supervision we can give them. We believe that we have to have it all figured out before we can finally relax and just be ourselves.

We are serious about life and we make sure life knows we are serious about it.

And what does life do in return?

It makes us the ass of the joke. It doesn’t take you and your little (or big) problems seriously at all.

There is a time to be serious but being serious about the imaginary stories we tell ourselves day in and day out is about as goofy as it gets.

Children imagine themselves in a lot of situations when they play. The difference is they stop imagining when they’re done playing. We, on the other hand, take the imagination home to the dinner table to complain about it.

Yes, children can seem serious when they play. But they’re unseriously serious or seriously unserious.

Remember when you played games with your friends or siblings?

You wanted to win. You were serious about it and fully immersed. But in all this seriousness you knew: You are just playing a game.

Everything can seem awfully serious at times, I know. But it doesn’t take much to be aware of the fact that all the importance you are assigning to things is a projection from your own mind.

You don’t gain anything by projecting excessive importance on things. It doesn’t make you a better person. You lose a lot of peace of mind though.

Some people who hear such a message are afraid that it means they have to give up their whole lives — quit their job, burn their house, sell their kids, and so on.

But what we’re talking about is primarily an inner change.

If you don’t want to change anything about your life, that’s fine.

Just imagine you keep living life the way you’re living it without all the excessive importance and all the associated anxiety, stress, worry, etc.

Wouldn’t things keep going just as well and perhaps even better?

If you’re taking life too seriously, then maybe you have forgotten that you’re playing a game.

Are you having fun? If not, look around.

What kind of game are you playing? Why are you playing a game you don’t like? What rules have you unknowingly bought into?

If you want, play a different game. Start right now.

Question the rules. Question the things you believe are set in stone. Question what you are. Question everything.

Before you say it, not taking life that seriously doesn’t mean that you should become a good-for-nothing bum or that suddenly all your responsibilities disappear. Nor does it mean that you shouldn’t play the game of life as well as you can.

It simply means stop taking life so damn seriously.

Not only is living without endless worry a way more pleasant way to live life but you’ll see that things tend to take care of themselves when you let them. (And I’m almost certain we all have had experiences of this.)

Of course this is easier said than done. But you can start with a simple step:

Just reduce your grip on things. Let go of some of the (illusionary) control and see what happens.

It takes some courage initially to flip your approach to life on its head.

You have to give up egoic motivations that were driving you like a racecar on the verge of breakdown.

But when you do give up the beliefs and associated mental habits that make your life a pain in the ass, the game will be a lot more fun.

When you see that another more enjoyable approach to life works, then you’ll, naturally, relax more and more into it.

And if you feel like it doesn’t work, your old way of life is always right there.

So really, it’s not as serious as it sounds.