How To Live A Totally Miserable Life

Take everything personally. Make everything about you. Form an opinion on whatever you see or hear.

Seek out news and gossip. Never miss a ‘breaking news’ update. Watch reality TV and talk about the contestants. Scroll your social media feeds as soon as you wake up. Set all notifications to ‘on’. Maximise your screen time. Blame others for your problems. Fail to take responsibility for your career and relationships not being where you want them to be. Flit between strategies. Believe the hype. Don’t look to improve. Believe you already know everything there is to know. Feel entitled to get that job or that promotion.

Compare your life to others. Make excuses. Ignore feedback. Obsess over your exes. Troll people online. Be the victim. Bitch about your friends when they can’t hear. Turn up late to meet them. Never apologise. Hold grudges. Rely on alcohol. Follow the crowd. Ask the universe to solve your problems. Give up easily.

Everyone has bad days, that’s cool. But when one bad day turns into a bad week, a bad month and a bad year, something needs to happen to break the cycle and change your trajectory.

Find comfort in the fact that you’ve taken yourself to this place, so you have the power to take yourself out of it. Nothing is impossible and breaking habits can be done. Take them one by one. Work on those things completely in your control and ignore the rest. Out of our control: the passing of time and the opinions of others. In our control: what we think, say and do. What we let affect our mood. How we conduct ourselves, what we wear, how we spend our time.

You have the power to break old habits and start new ones that will take you further from misery and further toward happiness, but you need to take the first step in doing so. This isn’t for anyone else to sort out; the world owes you nothing. Look yourself in the mirror, say “I got this” loudly and confidently. Let’s begin.