How To Enjoy Life

What is everyday? The RAE defines the everyday life as “the characteristic that distinguishes what is routine or common from everyday life”. According to H. Giannini, everyday life would be the area in which nothing “special”, nothing “extraordinary” happens, pure trifles: getting up when the alarm clock rings, having breakfast, taking the bus or subway, reading the email, etc. Thousands of gestures, small and imperceptible actions that make up everyday life. Everything happens as it should, without surprises, without sudden changes, or irruptions. Christian Lalive speaks of “ritualities” or “etiquettes” that are established in the story of daily life, thus constituting the everyday.

According to these definitions it seems that everyday life and routine are the same, but that is not exactly the case. Everyday life is the set of facts and events that take place in the world that surrounds a person and that they live and experience at every moment of the day. In this set of facts, some are constantly repeated and form “the routine” this is, the normal, the usual and expected, and others arise in an unforeseen and unexpected way, breaking the routine and altering “normality”, either in a pleasant and satisfactory way, or in an unfavorable way. Lalive points out: “In the most hidden part of everyday life, the event disturbs the routine, its rituals and its labels and imposes itself on us as the place of multiple lived (acted) dialectics of the routine and the event.” Therefore, routine is part of everyday life and is attached to it, because if both were the same we would see that today’s present would be identical to tomorrow’s.

What characterizes routine is the repetition of the same thing (Giannini states that “routine is a return to the familiar, to the same”), and this regularity makes it trivial and insignificant, creating the appearance that we have control of our daily lives. But if an unforeseen misfortune arises and the expected does not happen, something that happens more times than we would like (the train is late, the car does not start, a sprained ankle, a domestic accident, the flu, etc.), it occurs. a break from normality, a “setback,” that causes uncertainty and worry. That’s when the routine becomes relevant the insignificant becomes transcendent and what went unnoticed suddenly becomes the center of our attention, and the immediate consequence is an emotional alteration (anger, frustration, fear, sadness, anxiety, etc.) that makes our day bitter and It persists insistently in our minds, overwhelming and bothering us until the adverse situation disappears.

It is proven that breaking the routine due to some setback causes discomfort and tribulation and when this disappears and the routine returns we perceive a certain well-being. Given this fact, a reflection is worth considering: Why, if routine is a source of well-being, do we only appreciate it when we don’t have it? (e.g. we only remember health when we are sick). The answer is simple: routine pushes us to act most of the time “in automatic mode” (that is, when faced with the same repetitive stimulus we offer the same response) and we do not pay attention to other interesting things that are in front of us and go unnoticed. , and we only remember them when we don’t have them.

Everyday life is full of pleasant stimuli, some are part of routine scenarios and others are in our environment but they go unnoticed because we do not pay enough attention to discover and enjoy them. Giannini speaks of “the possibility of stopping before the unknown, before the extraordinary, and letting myself be seduced by it, following it.” Therefore, we should not waste the things that our daily lives offer us and appreciate them properly (following Horace’s famous carpe diem). For example, some ideas to enjoy life and live in the present are the following:

• Appreciate a fascinating landscape
• A tasty meal
• The intoxicating fragrance of a perfume
• Captivating music
• A pleasant conversation with friends
• A pleasant family reunion
• A comfortable home
• An exciting job

Making everyday life pleasant and satisfying and making setbacks less bitter or frustrating requires properly managing our daily life to turn it into a “healthy” daily life, savoring the pleasant routine events and decisively facing the unpleasant ones, thus turning it into an opportunity, whether enjoy well-being that it provides, or grow in the face of disturbing events when it breaks. Properly managing daily life requires considering the aspects that we will talk about below.

Everyday life is formed through the experiences that the person has in the space-time continuum where the events of daily life take place. Two dimensions can therefore be observed: one spatial and one temporal.

• In the first, the space is configured through the stage, which is the physical space where all events occur (home, work, street, etc.). The scenario is made up of all the elements (people, objects, environments, etc.) with which a person can establish a relationship of any type (personal, ideological, aesthetic, sensory, etc.) and at any time. In the same scenario, multiple relationships between its elements can occur.
• Regarding the temporal dimension, time expresses the moment in which each event takes place in a specific scenario and the duration of the experience that the person has in it. The time of everyday life is the present and, since time is a continuous flow, it can be said that it is a continuous present, without interference from the past or the future.

Taking into account these two dimensions, daily life is configured as the sum of all the scenarios that alternate over the successive days, and the objective of managing this will be try to spend as much time as possible in pleasant, stimulating and rewarding settings and avoid those that generate discomfort, frustration and displeasure.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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