No, you are not mad for wanting it, or for wanting a better life. However, you may be showing signs of madness in the way you do about it. But firstly, allow me to define madness:

Madness is described as doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results…

So many of us are unhappy with our lives. We simply cannot have the life we want, or buy the things we would like to have, or make our relationships work the way we want them to. We constantly express our desire for a better life – yet we continue to do everything the same way.

We tend to blame our situation on the situation. For example, we blame our lack of money on a lack of money. We blame our surroundings for what we are, and how we do things. In doing this, we allow two things to take place:

Firstly, We tend to get stuck in a “comfort zone” – even if it is far from “comfortable. On the one hand we do want things to change, but on the other hand we believe we are powerless against the forces against us. We do not believe ourselves capable of changing our future, and simply carry on, often hating every minute of it.
Secondly, by trying to find the cause for our unhappiness elsewhere, we are trying to shift the blame. We want to hold someone else, or something else, responsible for our present situation. Unfortunately, by sifting the responsibility, we also relinquish control.

After all, there is nothing you can do about what your environment does to you, right?

On the other hand, by accepting responsibility for your own situation, you also take the responsibility for your future. You take control by taking responsibility – or you lose it by shifting that responsibility.

When we shift the responsibility elsewhere, we don’t do anything about our lives, because we feel that we won’t be able to make any difference anyway. We simply give up, and carry on with our unhappy lives, hoping that someday things will be different.

We go on doing the same things every day. We keep the same bad habits, mix with the same negative people, harbor the same useless thoughts, and yet we expect things to change magically somehow.
We live the same life day in and day out, not changing anything, because it is someone else’s responsibility to change our future.

Does that sound like madness?

Author: Pj Prins