How does mature person perceive the future? The answer is that instead of seeing the future, you prefer to create it. What does that mean?

When you're young, the future is perceived as full of shining opportunities and meanings. After 40-50 years, much of the past seems empty and meaningless. Of course, love is the exception. Nevertheless, you realize that time could have been spent more beneficially, and when such an insight occurs, the perception of the future changes.

How does a slightly more mature person perceive the future? The short answer is that instead of seeing the future, you prefer to create it. What does that mean?

Oh, creating the future does not start with dreaming about what is desired, as many think. Creating the future begins with trying to reclaim your own time and mind, but that requires awakening. What kind of awakening am I talking about?

Awakening consists of several fundamental realizations:

1. The only gift life bestows upon us at birth is the 24 hours of today. This is the only thing that makes us all equal on this planet. In everything else, people are unequal.

2. Our future depends solely on how we fill our own 24 hours. Today. Not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, but today. External circumstances are not essential, because the future does not depend on external circumstances, but on how we respond to them or ignore them. We are free to make a choice if we can recognize that choice. In reality, it's more complicated, and I'll expand on this point later.

3. If we examine our 24 hours, we quickly find that they mostly do not belong to us. Our 24 hours are filled with hundreds of tasks that have nothing to do with our own life. We realize that we are not masters of our own time.

4. We start to look for the true masters and quickly find them in our own mind.

The masters of our time, and therefore of us, are hundreds of external ideas that make us do thousands of things, create a future, but not the one we want for ourselves.

Usually, we create a future for someone who makes us do all these things. We realize, if our 24 hours are filled with tasks that are not related to our future, then we have no future and cannot have one.

5. We begin to vaguely guess that all our dreams are not really ours. Therefore, starting to create the future from a list of our desires is not the best idea. Because for the most part, these are not our desires.

6. However, we are not children, and we try to understand how all these external ideas not only appeared in our mind, but became perceived as so close and right, as if they are our own ideas?

At what point and why did a foreign idea turn into our own manic thought that instantly makes us stop everything we were doing before and start following a strange program?

What makes us vulnerable, turns off critical thinking, common sense? How does the "useful idiot" program turn on and the "reasonable person" program turn off?

7. Investigating this issue, we see that any external idea is able to seize our time by capturing our attention.

8. The one who controls our attention controls our time. Moreover, we are ourselves as long as we control our attention.

As soon as someone or something captures our attention, we turn into caught zombies. However, the capture of attention doesn't explain why we so easily accept external ideas and forget about ourselves.

9. If we continue to investigate this question, we notice that our consciousness is full of stereotypes, beliefs, and myths that, like spies, open the gates every time an idea wanting to take control whispers a secret code. How did the stereotypes and beliefs get to us?

10. All stereotypes and beliefs were implanted in us by our parents, culture, and environment at that tender age when we absorbed everything indiscriminately, stuck our fingers into sockets, and even could eat poop. Furthermore, what we are used to calling our own personality is nothing more than a chaotic and contradictory heap of stereotypes, beliefs, faiths, myths.

How could our parents and friends commit such an evil? Alas, they are not to blame, as they carried similar spies from childhood, because their parents implanted them, and their parents did the same, and their parents and so on.

12. We begin to realize that the ideas controlling us have lived for thousands of years, forming the basis of religions, mythology, superstitions, culture. They force us to act in accordance with ancient behavioral programs, prescriptions, and protocols that we perceive as mandatory values.

13. We suspect that we were turned into "useful idiots", deprived of memory, critical thinking, and common sense a very, very long time ago. We react just like our ancestors thousands of years ago, especially when scared or angry. Even though we have smartphones!

With awakening, you start to sharply and regularly ask yourself questions - "Why do I do what I do? Where am I going? What do I want? What is the meaning of life?".

Some younger people think these questions usually stop being asked around the age of 30.

I would argue that 50% of humanity only starts asking these questions after 40, and after 50 nearly 100% of people are grappling with these questions. (If they are people, not "useful idiots".) We will often use this term, very accurate, though offensive. Alas, the most accurate definitions are often very offensive.