life on earth is short and if you don’t believe in an afterlife (like me), your main focus should be to enjoy your time here on earth. there are, of course, some guidelines we should try and follow in our pursuit of happiness.

focusing on happiness isn’t to say that you should always just do what makes you happy at the moment. you have to think about the big picture and favor long-term happiness over the short-term happiness induced by immediate fulfillment of our desires. it is very rare that what is immediately pleasing at the moment will result in long-term happiness as well.

this concept is the driving rationale for any practice in society where we invest in the present, to reap benefits in the future i.e. going to college to have a career we enjoy for the rest of our lives, etc. this concept extends into the realm of morality.

whatever we do in our life, we will have to live with in the future.  there is no absolute morality everyone can agree with, but you better make sure that your future self will be able to agree with the decisions you are currently making.

while it is true that the mind will often expand its range of morally acceptable actions to span immoral acts we’ve committed as a cheap reconciliation, that is not how we should live our lives. our morals are the ideas we have on acceptable behavior in a situation before we are ourselves entrenched in that situation. once we are in the situation, our judgment becomes clouded, skewed towards realizing the needs and desires we have for the outcome of a situation.