First of all, any action, item, or thing can be necessary or entirely useless. The real purpose and meaning is subjective and cannot be seen from the outset by any third party. Price, quality, or the amount of items is not relevant. The only thing that matters is your own point of view. Are you attached to your surroundings? Do they define who you are?

When you have a need for something you are not free. If you long for more things, shopping experiences, or just for the thrill of having always beautiful and new things to play around with all those are keeping you clung in the loop—you simply need more, and ever more. It might be exciting to travel a lot or switch a job once a year, but have you questioned why are you doing it? Are you sure that underneath there isn’t a pattern that you’re repeating? It might also be a fear. You need to feel important, useful, respected, admired, or busy. The common nominator is that you think that there is a need to window dress for something or someone. Funnily enough you might in reality only just try to fool yourself—no one else thinks anything of you nor is following your traces of thought. We all live in our subjective realities.

When you need to have in order to be it is time to reconsider your expectations and reasoning. How come you cannot be right now but only in the future after a certain activity or process? Owning something does not define who you are. They are simply the things that you happen to possess or have achieved like a title or education. Certainly you can communicate and express yourself with the things you have. But as long as you are not dependent on them you can enjoy them fully without being obsessed by their presence. A Ferrari does not need the driver—it tells its own story by its existence. However, many drivers use the car as a way to define who they are: I have this so I am like that—in their own mind. We buy peace of mind, for a very short time. Often the illusion disappears in a matter of minutes or days after we have gained something we have desired for. Then it is time to repeat the process and desire something else. We live by having. Still you can only live by being, but only after you have learned how to value your existence without any strings attached. Richness is about being, no matter what you have or do not have.

We are all after happiness but seldom find it but only for a few glances or passing moments. Most of the time we are seeking to gain it via different things, people, or situations. We try to reproduce the moments and experiences we already had or we are just randomly trying to imitate someone else’s life with their choices. And all these methods fail to provide us anything but suffering and continuous seeking of happiness—they all are external to us.

Happiness is a state of mind that is independent of the circumstances or our surroundings. It is our natural state of being that we have learned to ignore while growing up. We have substituted the internal happiness for objects and desires external to us. They are conditional and related to some activities or specific points in time. What is common to all of these is that they are not present right now. They are projected to the future. This type of happiness is something that you’re always waiting for. Your constant mode is to achieve and ‘earn’ your happiness by actions or circumstances. In other words you are living in illusions filled by your expectations. Disappointments are a frequent visitor when you are dealing with your future projections based on your expected outcomes of the future situations or events. How much in control of your life you really are?

This ‘when..then’ -type of conditioning is very convincing but it is not really living. It’s about building dream castles and denying the moment. You are saying that I’m not happy right now and I’m substituting this moment for another one in the future. You are after the carrot that is always attached to the current moment—the stick stays in the future with the appealing prize as well. This takes many forms. We may prefer to work overtime and then compensate it back in the holidays. Or we are accumulating substantial wealth that we are hoping to spend after retirement. How can you enjoy your life later if you cannot do it now?

Happiness is not a destination—it is a journey. If you are not comfortable being in the journey you are suffering in the destination as well. Life is about experiencing and enjoying every moment you have. It requires that you are comfortable with uncertainty and change. We can only be happy when we have learned to accept the things that we cannot change and regard every passing moment as a gift that has some valuable lessons and experiences to give us. Only when being is enough you can be happy. As long as you need to achieve or become you are not going to find happiness. Life is about change and being in the moment—exploring the unknown.

Work, holiday, retirement, hobbies, spare time, and weekend are not real. They are labels or symbols. You give them the meaning and special connotation. Those words often embody many expectations, hopes, wishes, and desires. And they are not real either.

Most of the titles have also their opposite counterpart. Work is considered as an opposite of pleasure or holiday. One needs to ‘work’ in order to have fun, later. This labelling is an excuse to delay or deceive oneself from the current moment. Categories are necessary as long as one needs the counterpart as well. This fragmentation is entirely useless in reality—unless you are living under its spell.

Replace the counterparts with their opposite adjectives and you start to see the absurdity. It may not be any big surprise to realise that most of the daily activities are filled with those more or less negative connotations. Wouldn’t this mean that you’re spending most of your time doing something you rather not like to do at all? If that’s the case maybe it’s time to re-evaluate your priorities. We can only live now and it happens 24 hours a day, every single day. No holidays or exceptions.

There are two ways to cope with the situation. Either you can take a new course and start to drop off the unpleasant things and replace them with the things you love to do or you can change your state of mind towards the various engagements and tasks in your life. Nevertheless the end result is that there is no need to have various labels in order to contrast things against each other. To say it more bluntly we are taking responsibility and control of our lives and this shows in the way we carry out our daily existence. Every moment we declare by our very presence who we are. We show it by our actions, possessions, social network, even by the way we treat total strangers. No labels needed—we simply are.

Integrated living means that one’s life is consistent and in balance. There is an overall harmony and ‘lightness’ without extreme fluctuations or sudden ’highs and lows’. If you need to ‘party hard’ in order to wash off the work stress are you really enjoying your work? Life is too short to do things we do not appreciate and enjoy doing. Even hard work is fun when you’re engaged with the activities that are close to your heart and bring fulfilment to your life. Compromising seldom brings good overall results in the long term.

Still not convinced? Check again the second paragraph. It’s all about your own expectations and assumptions. The catch-22 does not open if you do not reconsider your values and priorities. If you still need those lavish expensive holiday trips and you ‘work’ only to maintain your expensive ‘lifestyle’ aren’t you saying at the same time that most of your hours are sacrificial for the few moments you spend enjoying the ‘fruits’ of your labour. As long as you cannot enjoy your life now but later you’re living in dreams and illusions. Life happens now—never later. How can you appreciate the destination if you do not value the journey as well?

Freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand—the greater the freedom the greater the responsibility as well. Our current society does not encourage personal freedom. In practice we are sanctioned, monitored, and restrained in almost all aspects of life. We have learned to behave obediently and not to question the behaviour patterns or norms of the society. Like Goethe once said: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

We have created an artificial layer that is expected to protect individuals from harms and consequences of their personal actions. This has created a culture where people have become accustomed (or learned) to be passive and not to take action themselves. We expect someone else to tell us what to do or help us out of our own problems. This has come so far that we even regard we have the right and the others’ the moral obligation to unilaterally support us. We have isolated ourselves from the effects of our actions.

Our personal initiatives and responsibility are very limited, but so is our freedom as well. We have given up our rights in order to gain something for nothing. We prefer to have it easy and let others to bear the consequences for us. Unfortunately this is a zero-sum game in an aggregate level and as a result everybody is worse off. There are no free lunches—there is always someone paying the bill.

Isolating individuals from their actions’ consequences is a double-edged sword. It creates an illusion of safety and protection but at the same time it removes the control from the very person. And this creates uncertainty, fear, and self-esteem issues among others. Simply we do not feel anymore that the life is in our own hands: we are on top of the issues and have the solutions available for us. Confidence and security build from experience and the knowledge that we have the tools and the means to cope with our circumstances.

It requires practice and experience to become good at something. This means that we have learned something by experimenting and sometimes even making wrong choices that have guided us to do something differently in the future. In other words we have the motivation to keep going and get better. All this requires responsibility. Responsibility is the feedback mechanism that shows us how we are performing and the results of our pursuits. Mastery is only possible for those who are aware of their actions and their consequences.

Look around you—how much responsibility are we taking for our actions?

Separation means that there is something that is included and the rest is excluded. It defines limits and polarises its object from its environment. In most of the cases separation is also associated with independence. It is assumed that this separation is outside of its environment and hence it is a self-supporting unit. In reality, this is seldom the case.

Our virtual reality can be easily exposed and revealed. It actually does not really matter whether we consider an individual or a nation. Look around you and observe the world around you. Immediately you see a plenty of products and services. Some of them are crucial for your well-being. Life-supporting elements such as electricity, clean water, and food are the most obvious. Where do they come from? Part of the power is coming from local sources but often oil or other scarce supply is needed. Also you breakfast table is most likely catered with fruits and products around the world. Ever more of our ordinary life is imported elsewhere. Call to a contact centre and you might be redirected to India or other cheaper service location. Visit a retail store and realise that most of the electronics and other products are manufactured in China or Asia.

We need each other. We are dependent on each other. We breath the same air, we drink the same water, we eat the same food. Why we continue to consider ourselves as isolated and independent entities when the reality speaks otherwise? Ignorance and selfishness start already harassing our lives in forms of natural catastrophes and epidemical diseases. Exploiting elsewhere and shutting our eyes does not make the reality go away. We can only fool ourselves — in our mind. Still the reality has its means to give us wake-up calls. A time to stop dreaming?

In a way it’s funny that we are after the image in our mind we have perceived in the past. We got satisfaction from an occurrence and now we cannot get it back. We have the memory, the snapshot, of the feeling and that’s what we are after—reproduction of the image. We are in the illusion business.

When we get satisfaction from something we want it to last. Forever and ever, to be reproduced again. Finally the similar occurrence is not providing any pleasantness anymore. The illusion is gone. We have to try to find something else. We are after the great feeling—the perception of the memory. How tiresome.