Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Have Fun Now

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The reason people put off having fun is that they believe tomorrow is guaranteed. This secret belief in immortality, while a good form of anxiety reduction, is problematic because it’s an illusion. You are going to die, there’s nothing you can do to stop the inevitable, and your only real power is to decide what you’re going to do with the present.

The thing is that you don’t need a lot to have fun, all you really need is to decide that you’re going to embrace today with an open attitude, that you’re going to stop sweating the small stuff and once again see human life for the miracle it is. When you think about it, it’s actually masochistic to stop yourself from having fun, convincing yourself that there are too many ‘important’ things going on.

Regardless of your financial situation you can decide you’re going to start really enjoying life today, and that starts with the uncomfortable but ultimately useful realization that there might not be a tomorrow, that all your plans and aspirations could easily be in vain because you just don’t know what’s going to happen. You can make an educated guess but you don’t know for sure.

If you’re putting off your happiness, if you’re putting off having fun, you might just keep putting it off indefinitely, becoming behaviorally conditioned to a state of unhappiness, of non-fun. It makes absolutely no sense to do that to yourself, it’s a cognitive behavioral case of perception determining reality much more than the objective stimuli from your environment. If you decide you want to have fun then you will have fun regardless of your current situation.

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