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What a Dying Goldfish Can Teach Us About Living a Happier Life
Deterioration is subtle
Over time, left unchecked, the water in a goldfish bowl will get murky and start to smell. Then one day, the goldfish is floating on its side desperately trying to breathe. Only a change of water will help. It’s filthy. How could you not have noticed?
That’s the thing, though. It’s such a slow change from clear to dangerously dirty that unless we deliberately and regularly check it, we probably won’t notice there’s a problem until the fish is in trouble.
Now apply the concept of slow, creeping, barely noticeable deterioration to your home. Your job. Your peace of mind. Your relationships.
We don’t perceive incremental changes very much when we’re immersed in them. If you get a damp problem at home and don’t realize, you might not even notice it start to smell. Then over the weeks, it gets a little worse every day, but just a little.
Then you go away for a week and stay in a clean, fresh hotel and when you get back, there’s that awful smell of damp. How could you not have noticed?
I recently had a bed that was getting slowly more uncomfortable. Only when my sleep got so bad I felt unwell did I fix the problem—and what a difference it made when I could sleep again. But why did I wait until my sleep, and with it, my whole life, had suffered so much? Why do we wait until the goldfish is floating on its side—or until we can’t cope anymore?
Would I have put up with that mattress when I first used that bed? No! Would you accept that moldy smell when you first look around a house? No!
The threshold of what’s acceptable to us isn’t the same when it degrades compared to when we’re first introduced to something. We put up with bad things when they slowly creep up on us. No one said humans were logical.
Just like you wouldn’t put a goldfish directly into a bowl of crappy water that’ll probably kill it, you wouldn’t actively step into a terrible living arrangement, an abusive or bad relationship, or an underpaid job you’ll absolutely hate. Yet if our houses, relationships or working conditions slowly go bad, we’ll stay with them for years until it gets too much. Until we’re lying on our…
