When I told my friends about my recent struggles, it seemed like they tried hard not to smile at my first world problem- I’m so good at everything that I can’t make up my mind about what I want to do. My problem is that I’m looking for happines. Mum said I think too much. I laughed, but I think she could be right. Freedom, safety, control, happiness, feeling good enough, feeling at peace - all the wild gooses we keep chasing.

Self is a reference to the imaginary experiencer of the thoughts and sensations that we experience. Other people, as we know them, are representations that we built in our minds. We construct characters based on our memories of other people. Memories are interpretations of what we noticed. These characters have personalities. They have our thoughts and feelings attached to them. In the same way, we construct a character for ourselves.

When I was a kid, I was happy, peaceful and healthy all the time. Now I have to try. I was going to complain about life, then realised it’s because I was an extremely lucky kid. Recently, I seem to get irritated quite easily, and only reach a peaceful state of mind when I put aside time to really try. Still, I think it’s good progress that I learnt to notice how peaceful I’m feeling, and use the agitation as an alert to know when I should calm my mind.

This month I’ve been fascinated by meditation. At the end of last year, I got interested after I heard that meditation is the best way to learn about our minds and reality, from Yuval Noah Harari in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. I’ve been following Sam Harris’s meditation course. I think it’s profound. Motivation To always know that I don’t have to react to every thought and feeling that crosses my mind.