At his trial for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” As the new year approaches, I have been reflecting on four questions:
- What would you do if you had all the time and money in the world?
- How would you live if you knew you had only five to ten years left?
- And what would you most regret if you died tomorrow?
- Since you do not have all the time and money in the world and probably will live more than five to ten years, what changes are feasible for you to make now that would help you avoid your greatest regret or minimize regrets if you died tomorrow?
Goal setting is an essential part of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Albert Ellis was an extremely goal-directed man and believed that to achieve maximum pleasure and meaning in life, which he saw as the ultimate goal of life, one had better think about how best to use time. Time is not an elastic resource, and it only goes forward. Once time passes, it is gone forever, making it essential that we learn to use our time well. REBT has heavily borrowed from Stoicism. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, wrote, “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” It, therefore, is best for humans to have a healthy emotional reaction to the finiteness of life. It is beneficial to feel concerned that we may not be making the most of our lives or what some might be call misliving. By misliving, I mean not living your life according to the values and goals which will maximize the pleasure and meaning you could experience in life. By experiencing concern, you will feel motivated to reflect on how well you have been living. You, therefore, can take steps while time is available to enhance your life and live better. The attitude “I want to do now what I can to live my life to the fullest to have the fewest regrets as I possibly can while I lay on my deathbed” is a healthy attitude to adopt.
REBT attempts to help you minimize your emotional disturbance. Upsetting yourself will undermine your ability to maximize pleasure and meaning in life, as well as interfere with making the kinds of structural changes to your life that will maximize happiness and meaning. Applying REBT to minimize your emotional disturbance is not the focus of this piece. Instead, today I am focusing on what contemporary psychologists call positive psychology. Albert Ellis was a pioneer in the area of positive psychology and the philosophy of human happiness. In advance of the positive psychology movement currently in vogue, he recognized that people turn to psychotherapists to go beyond diminishing emotional disturbance. Decreasing emotional disturbance is essential to do, but increasing satisfaction may be more critical. He saw that people solicited assistance in maximizing life satisfaction. People by nature set goals, and then once they attain a goal, they move their goalposts and often want something more or different. They begin to become dissatisfied. The question is what to do about this dissatisfaction. One option is to accept dissatisfaction as an inevitable aspect of life. A second option, advocated by the Stoics, is that we recalibrate our hedonic thermostat by imagining the loss of some of the things we take for granted to appreciate them in the present and thereby restore satisfaction with things as they are. Another approach is to actively address dissatisfaction with the hope of stretching oneself in life and attempting to derive more satisfaction, personal meaning, and growth through personal reflection, philosophy, and calculated risk-taking.
REBT is a philosophically based psychotherapy. In my view, it is more than an approach to psychotherapy. It is an outlook on life. Said another way, REBT is a philosophy of life aimed at facilitating psychological health, pleasure, happiness, and meaning in life. As a philosophy of life, it suggests that you integrate these healthy elements into your approach to life:
1. Self-interest – A healthy approach to life is to put oneself first, guiltlessly and shamelessly, while holding others a close second (not a distant second). Doing so does not mean that one must put themselves first all the time. It merely means they can do so when the matter is of sufficient importance to them and then proceeds with due ethical regard for others.
2. Social interest – A healthy approach to life is to consider the impact of your behavior on others. Because we live in a social world, it is in your long-term best interest to consider others’ feelings, goals, and rights while not holding yourself responsible for managing others’ emotions or their lives. Instead, strive to model emotional responsibility for others to witness so that they, too, learn how to take care of themselves and to be responsible for and manage their emotional reactions in a challenging world.
3. Self-direction and Independent Thought – A healthy approach to life is to consider the advice and teaching of informed others, but in the end, dare to engage in independent thinking, make your own decisions, and remain fully responsible for the consequences of these decisions.
4. High frustration tolerance / High discomfort tolerance – A healthy approach to life is to cultivate patience for frustrating circumstances, internal states of discomfort, and inconvenience to achieve long-term goals and maximize your overall happiness and meaning. It is healthy to accept that work and practice are how skills are acquired and mastered, even if the process is slow and frustrating.
5. Flexibility – A healthy approach to life is to hold flexible and non-extreme attitudes leading to flexible and adaptive behavior. Psychological flexibility enables you to adapt to people and living conditions that you find challenging and to remain broad-minded in your views. You avoid making rigid rules for yourself and others.
6. Acceptance of Uncertainty – A healthy approach to life is to recognize you live in a world of probability where absolute certainty and guarantees do not exist. You are comfortable basing decisions and actions on the likelihood of a particular set of events occurring. You remain open to the unknown.
7. Commitment to creative, vitally absorbing pursuits – A healthy approach to searching for personal happiness and meaning is to have self-selected goals that interest you and then actively pursue them. This creative involvement stems from a healthy sense of curiosity, which one strives to maintain throughout life.
8. Scientific thinking – A healthy approach to life is to strive to think logically, reason correctly, and use scientific reasoning to falsify hypotheses to understand how life itself works. Scientific thought is a tool for problem-solving and achieving one’s goals.
9. Unconditional Self-Acceptance – A healthy approach to life is to strive to accept yourself unconditionally while appreciating that you are a highly fallible human. You discipline your mind to evaluate your many parts, especially your behavior, without downing or condemning yourself when your actions fall short of your standards. You strive to abolish your ego and stick to rating aspects of yourself to improve those parts you wish to improve.
10. Unconditional Other-Acceptance – A healthy approach to life aims to unconditionally accept other people while viewing all people as fallible humans or born mistake-makers. REBT philosophy acknowledges that it is often useful to rate and value other people’s behaviors. It recognizes that the individual is responsible for their actions but avoids a global judgment of the other person’s human value, whose conduct is the evaluation’s focus. REBT philosophy holds that all standards for rating people as people are arbitrary, and therefore human worth cannot be objectively defined and determined. REBT philosophy views all people as highly complex beings and continuously evolving ones, making rating people invalid.
11. Unconditional Life-Acceptance – A healthy approach to life is to avoid overgeneralizations about the whole of life. View life as having both good times and bad times. Accept both ends of this continuum and avoid the attitude that life should always be comfortable and without difficulty, and strive to enjoy life as fully as possible despite the inevitable hassles, sorrows, losses, and burdens of the human condition.
12. Calculated Risk-taking – A healthy approach to life is to accept the uncertainty of life. Cultivate the capacity to take calculated risks to maximize your pleasure in life and achieve self-selected goals. Take these risks with the appreciation of the possible benefits and potential losses that may ensue. When risking taking fails to achieve the desired outcome, rely upon your unconditional self-acceptance, unconditional life-acceptance, and your ability to manage your emotional reactions and tolerate the consequences of your failed actions.
13. Long-range hedonism – A healthy approach to life is to view it as an opportunity to enjoy oneself rather than as a test to prove oneself. Therefore it is crucial to maximizing pleasure by living for both the short run and the long run and cultivating the ability to delay immediate gratification and exercise sufficiently high frustration and discomfort tolerance to achieve self-selected long-term hedonistic goals.
14. Nonutopianism and nonperfectionism – A healthy approach to life is to accept that utopias and perfection do not exist. It is good to choose not to disturb yourself over the imperfection you encounter while striving to make things better to maximize enjoyment. It is essential to accept that it is impossible to achieve a state of perfection and far better to make improvements where possible. Perfect happiness and meaning in life may be unattainable, but greater life satisfaction may very well be achievable with reflection and effort.
15. Self-responsibility for your emotional disturbance – A healthy approach to life involves acknowledging that life’s adversities and other people’s misbehavior contribute to your feelings but do not determine your emotional upsetness. It is beneficial to appreciate that your rigid and extreme attitudes, which you construct and choose to hold about life’s adversities, lie at the base of emotional disturbance. As a result of this acceptance of emotional responsibility, it is healthy to strive to develop adaptive, flexible, and realistic attitudes that enable you to function in a challenging, imperfect world full of fallible humans.
16. Healthy Sense of Humor – A healthy approach to life is to maintain a healthy sense of humor by not taking yourself, others, the world, or life itself too seriously nor without sufficient concern. It is best to feel concerned, not anxious, and not cross the line into over-seriousness associated with emotional disturbance.
17. Semantic Precision – A healthy approach to life involves striving to think in a semantically precise way. Instead of engaging in overgeneralized thinking such as “I always fail” or “Everything is bad,” it is better to precisely acknowledge that you have failed in a particular endeavor or conditions are bad but avoid an overstated description of reality. Likewise, other examples of semantic precision are thoughts and statements like “You have misbehaved this time, but you are not a bad person” and “life has many difficulties, but it not always difficult.” Semantic precision in thought and language allows for more accurate internal representations of reality and greater emotional well-being. It is healthy to monitor your thinking and correct any instances of sloppy, imprecise thinking in the face of adversity to re-establish healthier emotional and behavioral reactions. It is good to strive to discipline your thinking to be precise and scientific, which will help your effort to adapt to challenging conditions.
18. Acceptance of Death and the Process of Dying – A healthy approach to life is to accept the prospect of your death, the death of loved ones, and the process of dying. Appreciate that death is always a distinct possibility, with its hour being the unknown. Strive to lead a meaningful and satisfying life free of unhealthy negative emotions towards life’s finiteness and the process of dying.
To use REBT philosophy to maximize your life satisfaction, you might begin by asking if your life includes the elements specified above. If your life needs some improvement in one or more of these areas, you may want to evaluate if there are irrational attitudes that block you from adopting these elements and implementing them. If you are having difficulty incorporating the ideas specified above, your problem could lie with holding rigid attitudes about the effort involved in incorporating these elements into your life or the possible negative consequences that may ensue if you were to include them. If this is the case, then you would likely profit from challenging these attitudes, relinquishing them, and replacing them with flexible attitudes towards the difficulty of incorporating these elements into your life, as well as the possible consequences that may ensue if you were to include them. Keep your desire for ease and guaranteed favorable outcomes but see that you never have to have ease and guaranteed outcomes. Remind yourself you can tolerate discomfort and uncertainty. See that discomfort and uncertainty in life are unavoidable when working to improve the conditions of life.
Let us return to the four questions mentioned at the top of this essay.
- What would you do if you had all the time and money in the world?
- How would you live if you knew you had only five to ten years left?
- And what would you most regret if you died tomorrow?
- Since you do not have all the time and money in the world and probably will live more than five to ten years, what changes are feasible for you to make now that would help you avoid your greatest regret if you died tomorrow?
Take a moment to write down your answers to each question. Doing this exercise may make you aware of the path you are on in life and question if course adjustments may be reasonable to make while time permits. If you are drifting through life, consider that you may later have regrets that you did not live your life to the fullest. It is impossible to reach the end of one’s life and not look back and have some regrets. You are a fallible human, and it is impossible to live a perfect life. The question is how to minimize those regrets or avoid those regrets that will be the most painful ones to bear as the end of your life draws near.
Start the new year by reflecting on how best to use the time ahead. Remind yourself of the REBT position that life is an opportunity to enjoy yourself and not prove yourself. Keep your ego out of things to the best of your ability. Be honest with yourself as you evaluate your life. Hold the healthy attitude that there are no guarantees that your efforts to correct the path you are on will pay off. Accept the uncertainty involved in life. Rather than yield to the ease of drifting, do some serious thinking and see that it is good to make an effort to pursue what you want with the one life you will ever have. Acknowledge the shortness of life and then strive to maintain a healthy sense of unconditional self-acceptance, unconditional other-acceptance, and unconditional life-acceptance as you course correct and go further down your path in life.
Bottom line: Time waits for no one. Make the most of your life. REBT philosophy can help you do this.
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