Why We Subconsciously Love To Create Problems For Ourselves

I think most people could objectively look at their lives and see how frequently the problems they had were of their own making, their suffering self-inflicted. We absolutely love to make problems for ourselves, and we do it all the time.

We worry needlessly, we choose immobility, we resist acceptance, we externalize our power, we surrender our ability to choose when really, it’s up to us to decide how we react, when we change, what we entertain our minds with. It’s yet another symptom of our own masochism to say that we don’t have a choice in the matter.

And we do it because we love it. There’s something… fun… in making problems for ourselves. There is something we keep returning to. Whether it be because we feel we deserve it, that it gives our lives meaning, that it gives us human credibility for having been through something – anything – we want to create our own problems.

Because when we are the ones who make them, we are the ones who can overcome them.

It seems we almost stage accomplishments in our minds. We subconsciously know that we’re going to get through it, but we choose to entertain the suffering only to feel that sense of “ah, I’ve done something, I’ve proven my own strength.” We make things difficult so they seem warranted of feeling good when they aren’t anymore. The more we suffer, the more something is worthwhile.

We craft our victories subconsciously. We know there’s no point in fretting or worrying about anything: if something can be solved, solve it. If it cannot, worrying and fretting will not suddenly change that. In either scenario, it is pointless, needless noise.

But the point is that we like worrying and fretting. If we didn’t like it so much, we probably wouldn’t do it incessantly. It feeds some human part of us that modernization has robbed us of. What are we surviving? What is the point? Why, why, why?

Well, because when everything has an answer, what is there to do? If everything has a solution, what is there to consider, or work toward, or feel excited about accomplishing? Or rather, really, why do we need to work toward something? Why do we need to feel excited about accomplishment rather than what we already have? What exists within us that is so unsettled that we cannot be at peace?

I think we create our own problems to address the things we know would otherwise become issues outside of our control. We make them in ways that allow us to heal, address, fix, cope, and acknowledge whatever we want to get to before some other heartbreaking, external circumstance does it for us.

We create our own problems in the scope of knowing we eventually have the solutions, so we can safely (albeit painfully) deal with them. So really, it’s not a matter of not making issues for ourselves, but being aware enough to understand what they are… and that we’re asking ourselves to heal them.