The Happiness Project: Conclusion

Putting my dream plan for work and life into ink and actual concrete thoughts might have actually lowered my happiness score! I think I was ignorantly enjoying my life with what I’ve been given. Now that I’ve contemplated my dream life, I wish I had that $10 million dollars or the carefree mentality to just quit my job and start living my dream. Alas, my desire for stability is stronger than my desire for the dream.

One thing I’ve noticed in doing this assignment is how much I love to travel and experience new things, and how high those are on my list of things to do. And I think that is telling me just how much I need to move out of Utah next year. I’ve been here since 1998 when I came to BYU for my undergraduate degree – that’s 14 years! Maybe my Mr. Right got out of Utah ages ago because he’s similar to me in that need to experience new places. Heaven knows I’ve dated a lot of Mr. Wrong’s that are still here in Utah too. If I want a Mr. Right to have all these characteristics that I hope to have, I need to take action and live those characteristics now until I become them and it seems like getting out of Utah will be my first step for that. It also seems like it will be my first step in living something close to my dream but I can still do it with stability – by landing a job first before I move, if that is possible. (Hopefully a master’s degree and ten years of work experience will help with that.) Don’t get me wrong. I love Utah. Really, I do. I have enjoyed living here, and I feel like I have taken advantage of all the good things the state has to offer.

In the end, I learned from this assignment that if you want to make dreams and goals a reality, you really do have to write them down. I’ve only ever thought of these things in passing. Putting them down on paper opens my eyes to the difference of how I’m actually living my life from my dream and what the cause is. It makes me contemplate how I might learn to live with the non-dream life or how I might need to temper my desire for stability so that I can act on my dream, at least a little bit.