Every situation has a silver lining – discover a mindset that heals and enlightens.
December 15, 2021 · 7 min read
If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things. ~ Albert Einstein
Are you feeling down lately?
Have you wondered whether does life get better?
We all face our ups and downs. It’s natural to fall into a loop of doubts sometimes. That’s how we truly understand the real answers – by questioning them.
Life gets better only if you want it to get better. Every single decision depends on you. You have a lot of influence on how the decision will turn out.
If you really try to make the most out of yourself, your life will get extremely better.
Does life get better or worse?
As you get older, your life actually gets better. You become more mature and you care less about little things. You can focus on what really matters to you.
If life gets worse, it means you have been taking wrong decisions so far. When you’re still a teenager, there’s not much things you can change, as you are very dependent on your family.
However, when you are able to make your own decisions, make your own money, and start living for yourself, that’s when life goes either better or worse. Everything depends solely on you.
When does it get better?
It gets better when you start making mindful decisions. You realize that your health, financials, relationships mostly depend on you.
It gets better when you start filtering what matters and what doesn’t. For example, you don’t care to win anymore small arguments. You prefer rather having peace of mind.
Age wise, it differs for everyone. While some people understand that in their 20s, some people need another two or more decades to understand that.
The faster you take your life in your hands, the sooner things get better.
Take a look at this video if you’re feeling behind in life:
Why is my life not getting better?
Your life might not be getting better because you have your priorities set inappropriately. You focus more on short-term pleasures rather than long-term.
That’s because life is not a short-term shot. It’s actually a long-term journey and things get better with time. You need a lot of perseverance and discipline to achieve whatever you want.
You have to focus setting your life up for your future. That doesn’t mean not to enjoy your life in the present.
You should enjoy your life as much as possible without damaging your future plans. That’s when life gets better surely.
12 Reasons why life gets better
1. You start aligning with your skills and talents
As you get older, your skills get better and better. You gain more expertise which helps you to navigate through the unknown.
The most important thing is that you start utilizing your skills and talents in a very effective way. You start aligning them with what matters in life.
Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing. ~ Seneca
For example, if you are a great leader in your workplace, you become a great leader in your home environment too. You are compassionate, encouraging to learn, you know how to make your family members feel loved.
If you have a good developed analytical thinking, you start analyzing your problems that occur in life. Things get better with time when you get more deeply into the root problem rather than eliminating the surface problem.
2. You become more aware what stops you in life
Life gets immensely better when you finally understand what the number one reason for all your unsuccess and success is.
That reason is no one other than YOU.
Rather than blaming everyone around, blaming the environment, being a victim, you start taking responsibility for your own actions.
Everyone has the ability to be consciously aware, but to use it to the full potential is not for everyone to understand.
3. You don’t bother with something that you have no control over
One of the biggest reasons why life gets better is the comprehension of what you can control and what you cannot.
The more you bother with something you can’t control, the worse your life will get.
Remember those days at school when you constantly worried what grade will you receive?
Are you still worrying what others are thinking about you?
If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Are you frustrated with government policies and decisions?
You simply can’t control everything you want. Those events don’t depend on you and hardly ever will.
You’re doing only one favor to your life and body – make it more stressful and worrying. As you get older, you understand that it’s nonsense to worry about these things. When you worry about them, your life gets worse.
4. You compare yourself to others less
Especially in our childhood and adolescence, we compare ourselves to others a lot. As everyone have very similar interests and are in almost the same life page, it’s common to compare who’s more athletic, prettier, wiser, richer, etc.
Such behavior provoked anxiety, anger, irritation, envy, sadness, and many other feelings. You tried to become someone who you weren’t. You blamed the world because you are not as successful as your peers.
As we get older, we start comparing ourselves to others less. Our life gets better because we have one less big nuisance.
While comparing ourselves to others is good sometimes to check if we’re developing ourselves, but constant comparison is not healthy for our mind.
That’s why your life gets better with time – you become independent and look after your own interests.
5. You can set yourself for the future
When you are old enough, you don’t have to be dependent on anyone else anymore. You can buy whatever you want, go wherever you want, and do things that you truly like.
However, being too extremely laid-back only makes one part of your life better – the present. Your future isn’t included in your plans.
Turn your wounds into wisdom. ~ Oprah Winfrey
Life gets better with time because you also incorporate your future plans in your present. You are aware that what you eat, how you take care of your body, will reflect in the future.
You are also aware that saving more money and continuously learning things will improve your life in the future tenfold. Yes, things get better with time if only you deeply care about them.
6. You become wiser
Knowledge doesn’t come for everyone in an instant. Everyone has to work for it for hundreds, if not thousands of hours.
You start understanding that what society has been insisting is not necessarily true. Things simply don’t work the way they should.
Also, you get a broader vision about life in general. What bothered you 10 years ago, doesn’t bother you anymore at all, because now you have an understanding about the topic.
You can direct all your knowledge to your advantage in many, many ways. It all depends on you if your life gets better with time.
7. You become noticed more
In our young days, everyone looks similar from body composition point of view. When you hit 30s or older age, that’s when you become more noticed.
People get sorted like through a filter – those who cared about themselves both health and knowledge wise get more attention, and those who neglected that simply drown into the abyss.
You never really learn much from hearing yourself speak. ~ George Clooney
You also have more accomplishments than, for example, comparing to your 20s. It doesn’t have to be materialistic. You could’ve matured even more by now, adopted a good humor, became more outgoing, and similar.
If you work on yourself, life gets better. There’s no reason for it to go worse at that point.
8. You don’t bother being nice to everyone
Personally, I used to be very nice to everyone in my young days. I was people pleaser and neglected my own happiness and time.
Surely, it’s a part of life to show kindness to people, but you start filtering between people who genuinely care about your help and those who try to take advantage of you.
You start filtering between people who deserve your kindness and those who play victim and always need compassion.
You simply don’t bother wasting your time with them and move on with your life. Trust me, life gets immensely better with such approach.
And no, it doesn’t mean that you are living only for yourself. It means that you have self-respect and value your time. You help those who are really in need and motivated to receive your hand.
9. You have better emotional control
Life gets better because you are capable to control your emotions better than ever before. You aren’t that sensitive as you were previously.
You care what people say about you less and less. You don’t take every word from others as a matter of fact.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. ~ Albert Einstein
It doesn’t mean that you are living a life blindfolded, though. It means that you take constructive criticism from other people and still try to improve yourself.
When people are just criticizing you without any reasonable arguments, that’s when you shut down and don’t even bother listening to them. That doesn’t affect your emotional state.
Positive emotions make you to enjoy your life more [1]. It’s almost as a superpower that makes your life better in so many ways. Your both mental and physical health becomes better, you see life through a brighter lens and with a big smile on your face.
10. You learn more about yourself
It’s common for people to not know what excites them in life and what they’re passionate about. This can continue even till your 50s.
If you really take a grip on yourself, you will start exploring what life can offer. Your life will get better as you broaden your mind.
We are privileged in these modern times to have access to almost everything. We have an opportunity to discover ourselves faster than our parents or grandparents could.
As you start discovering yourself, your life quality becomes immensely better. You feel more grateful for what you have and that you can enjoy your life.
People are mostly unsatisfied in life because they don’t know what excite them. They also can’t find any ways to enjoy it without having a lot of money.
That’s one of the biggest gaps between people that know how to enjoy life and those who are still lost in life.
11. You challenge yourself more
When we were younger, we were forced to challenge ourselves. It brought very little joy. Our freedom to learn what we wanted was very limited.
It felt as if we were a bunch of chickens that were caged in a small cubicle. We all had to obey the same rules and compete with each other.
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. ~ Helen Keller
It even seems as if majority of students, according to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, are motivated to study only because of higher pay [2]. That makes 74.6 percent of students that have such opinion.
As we have escaped the school, college, university, we can start challenge ourselves what really matters to us. Our life gets so much better because we are interested in what we are doing.
We can absorb the information that deeply interest us like sponges. We choose our own pace of challenging ourselves and lead our own lives the way we want.
12. You value life more
Life is an exceptional gift. Life is everything.
In our young days we don’t value life as much. We feel immortal and we chase after other things, often materialistic ones.
As we get older, we start valuing life more. We start stopping by things that didn’t bring joy before. We start enjoying great food, the nature, surroundings, smelling flowers, valuing every piece of life even more than before.
We also feel more grateful for what we have. We feel grateful for our relationships, the place where we live at, freedom which allows us to do whatever we want.
You can’t live only for materialistic things. Certainly, they take a big part of our lives, but they aren’t the only source of happiness. Heck, they aren’t even the main one.
The ability to function as an alive person is what makes life better than ever before.
Final Words From Delightful Mindset
While life is a rollercoaster and full of unexpected challenges, both stressful and joyful ones, it’s important to always keep your head up.
After a heavy rain comes a beautiful rainbow. Same principles apply to our lives. With every challenge we face, the wiser we become.
Life gets better with every challenge you face. Never forget to keep a balance between the present and future. Only then you will be happy.
- Cohn, M. A., Fredrickson, B. L., Brown, S. L., Mikels, J. A., & Conway, A. M. (2009). Happiness unpacked: positive emotions increase life satisfaction by building resilience. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 9(3), 361–368. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015952
- University Of Central Florida. Challenge Yourself To Learn More Than Is Being Taught. Jan 20, 2016 [viewed Dec 15, 2021]. Available from: https://www.ucf.edu/news/challenge-yourself-to-learn-more-than-is-being-taught/