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What are the conditions needed to live each day without worry?

There are many different opinions on this, but I have concluded that there are two main conditions:

• Satisfaction with the present

This means how satisfied you are with your current life, and how healthy your physical and mental state is.

However, the more I think about it, the more it seems that my perception of the present is not independent of my perception of the future. I think that the present and the future are mutually complementary and influence each other. We should not forget that the concept of time is quite conceptual. Humans feel that time passes, but the concept of spacetime shows that time is a concept with coordinates similar to space.

• Expectation for the future

This can be replaced with the word "hope." Hope is how optimistic your view of the future is. There is no long-term pessimistic hope (probably). As long as there is an expectation that things will get better in the future, humans can continue to live with more strength. This slightly abstract concept of "hope" or "expectation" has been redefined as debt in capitalism. Debt, or debt, has gained a little bit of physical substance under the larger concept of money. Personally, I think that the greatest positive change that capitalism has brought to humanity is the concept of investing in the uncertainty of the future, using the future as leverage to multiply the power of the present.

If we call the will to live "life" and the will to die "death," we can summarize how these two factors affect humans as follows:

                                    Satisfaction with the present ↑ Satisfaction with the present ↓

Expectation for the future ↑                Life (best)                            Life

Expectation for the future ↓                Life                                    Death

For the will to die to be fulfilled, both satisfaction with the present and expectation for the future must be lacking. If one of the two conditions is at a sufficient level, you can continue to move forward with the motivation to live.

This post was written to reflect on suicide.

Simply put, if you think that your current life is difficult and painful, and that the future will be the same or worse, you are more likely to have suicidal thoughts.

On the other hand, if your current life is relatively good, you are likely to continue living even if your expectations for the future are quite low. Even if your current life is the worst, if you have an expectation that things will definitely get better in the future, you are likely to continue living despite the pain.

However, as mentioned earlier, these two conditions are mutually complementary and are more correlated than you might think. They are likely to rise and fall together. There are occasional cases where this is not the case (a happy missionary with a terminal illness, an entrepreneur who succeeded after living in a single room), but in general, if one number is too low, it can have a negative impact on the other.

So what should we do?

Can we always maintain the highest level of expectation for the future and satisfaction with the present? Here, the story of "anti-fragile," resilience, that we often hear about is helpful. As the time horizon lengthens, unexpected events often occur, and there is also the possibility of a really serious, black swan-level event. To prepare for these worst-case scenarios, it ultimately depends on how efficiently and quickly individuals can respond.

After writing this, it turned out to be a post that doesn't help much.

So what should I do? I just thought about it and thought it would be interesting to post it on my blog... I might realize how ridiculous and stupid this thought is when I read it again in the future...

**Finally, I would like to add that if you are actually in the "death" cycle, it is important to quickly identify the factors that are bothering you in the present and the factors that are making you anxious about the future. You should break the "malicious thought loop" that is constantly circulating in your head. In my experience, when you have bad thoughts, your imagination is unnecessarily activated and you can only imagine the worst-case scenario. You should judge whether that is an accurate prediction from a rational point of view. And even if you think it is accurate, you should think about how inaccurate "predictions about the future" are (even supercomputers cannot accurately predict the weather in this day and age), and whether it makes sense for your brain to perfectly measure and predict the future with countless variables. And the best way to break this cycle is usually for your body to move before your head makes a judgment.

Okay, so this was translated by Bard, Google's AI Chatbot. I think it did a great job. I think I might even use bard to translate stuff instead of Google Translate, Naver Papago, or even DeepL. It even made bold statements which wasn't included in the original blog essay.