When the going gets tough...

When I look back at my life as a smoker, I see now what an addiction that smoking is. I was happy to justify my smoking to serve my habit. I loved smoking so much that I would happily smoke in all sorts of weather (I live in Ireland!). I loved them and thankfully, at the time, I had a boss who understood me popping out for smoke breaks. Now that I run a business, I see how understanding. Imagine the downtime he allowed me to sate my habit? I see now how we (my wife smoked as well) were controlled by the smoking despite our lip service to the contrary.
So it is with the live I lead now. When I look back at my life as an employee and how I justified my unhappiness. Psychologists call it "learned helplessness". The experiment was done on dogs in a partitioned cage. They were given that were given no means of escape and were given a mild electric shock. After this constantly happening even when the dogs were given a means to escape to the other side of the partition, they didn't. They had learned to be helpless. Their reasoning was "this bad thing has happened to me so often with no means of escape, what's the point even looking?". A form of this is used in training elephants too but that would take me off on a tangent.
So that was my life for 15 years, learned helplessness. I wish my boss would give me a raise but what am I going to do? I wish my boss would give me more holidays but what am I going to do? I wish I could start work later in the day but what am I going to do? I need the money so I had to play the game, right? Well you tell me, is a J.O.B. (Just Over Broke in case you haven't heard it before) the only way in this world to make money?
Now thanks to pioneers such as Dr. Martin Seligman psychologists have opened up a whole new field of thinking called "learned optimism". If you can learn to be helpless surely the converse is true? Can't we learn to be happy? Surely if we take note of all the good things that happen in our lives, if we take note how many of those occurrences are attributed directly to actions that we have taken, that surely as there is learned helplessness, there is learned optimism. And so it is in my life. I have taken ownership of my actions and of my life. When something goes wrong the error is not pervasive. My life isn't going to terrible in all areas.
So here's 411: people of my age (I'm 40) have lived through recessions before, they're not the end of the world. We came out the far side with appreciation for what we have now. And even that was forgotten in the height of the good times. You don't even have to have lived through a recession to know that it's not the be all and end all - the world is still here for God's sake. Society is still here, it still exists! In my time it was "The Bomb". Both the US and Russia (as it was then) had stockpiled an awesome amount of nuclear power. Organisations such a CND, with their logo were ubiquitous. Our lives were lived in fear and there was a recession on too. Many of my friends sought work overseas (thank you America!) but the one thing I do remember is... the music. Filled with inspiration, hope, rebellion.
So I'll leave this with you: because of this economic climate and the mindset I'm in due to the home business I'm in, I making money... Or to quote Mark Twain "I experienced many problems in my life, some of them real."