I suppose many people in the West tend to think ahead: they perceive their lives as a certain path they have to follow-choose the right school, the right college, get the right job, earn towards your retirement etc .Planning the future takes their thoughts away from the present, which they don't fully appreciate when it's actually happening. Later,it might come back as a lovely memory, but that's all. This brings to mind John Lennon's"Life's what's happening to you when you're busy making other plans", as well as excellent lectures by Alan Watts. I remember one in which he criticised the western idea of life being a journey..What is there when you reach your destination? Why not think of life as a dance, in which you enjoy the very act of dancing,and which is NOT, like a journey, about getting from A to B. Perhaps this goes off at a tangent, with regard to your question, but that's what I thought of! All the best!

The heart's never content but I try to be. Is this a compromise? I'm not sure. I just make the best out of what is there for me, and be the change I want to see in this world. So if you really want something, maybe you should go for it and see what happens. We all die in the end anyways (my mom hates this speech lol she thinks I'm a pessimist), so live happily. :) Thanks for this entry, cuz I think a lot of people are thinking it.

It's been interesting to read your thoughts, but as a matter of fact you just confirmed the idea of my entry: we're bound to live as other people expect us to do =) Thanks for your attention and wishes!

oh,happy holidays to you! ^ .^

First of all, I don't think you this is pessimism. Because, I've also often such mood. In the junior and senior high school, I always wonder why I will withstand the pressure to enter college, not free to life, I want to go to any place, do whatever I want to do. I think it is human thinking, is very normal thinking. Just now, most people have been living by material submerged, they do not go to think these things anywhere. But now, after reading university, I have come not to think about these things, because I need to consider some more practical things, but to those who will only make me more depressed and don't know why. The world in change, era in progress, we probably never learn the ancients some lifestyle (because China has many of the ancients is abandon all pursuit of freedom, like tao yuanming and Lao tze, etc.)