Tim Urban, writer of the famous blog “Wait But Why,” has a beautiful perspective about happiness in life. He calls it Pixel Theory. Here, we paraphrase his post, “Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel”:
We often see our life as a rich picture depicting an epic story and assume that the key to happiness lies in the broad components of the image. But this is a mistake because we don’t live in the picture’s broad strokes. At any moment, we live in a single pixel of the image — a single Today.
So, while thousands of our Todays will, to an outsider from far away, begin to look like a complete picture, we spend each moment of actual reality in one unremarkable Today pixel or another. Our error is brushing off a mundane Wednesday and focusing entirely on the big picture, when in fact the mundane Wednesday is the experience of our actual life.
And our assumption that future Todays would be as vibrant and rich as the broad picture of our life is misunderstanding the unremarkable nature of a pixel, no matter what our life looks like in broad strokes. This assumption leads us to feel like our uneventful Today must be an unsatisfactory temporary relationship when in reality it’s an inevitable and permanent marriage that we must accept and embrace in order to be happy.
As far as what will actually make us happier as we live in our mundane Wednesday, there are a number of scientifically proven things, like spending time with people we like, sleeping well, exercising, working on a pet project, and being kind to others.
We spend so much time looking up at the great things that will come our way and planning our future happiness and not nearly enough time looking down and thinking about how badly we used to want so many of the things we currently have. Always be grateful and make your Today beautiful.
It’s a great blog to read in general. Original post here:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-in-pixel.html