I often meet people with “problems” in their personal lives. The relevance of this issue is fueled in every possible way by advertising - there are happy couples everywhere, “oh, He noticed me, what if I smell bad” , “She’s perfect, I’ll give her candy.” In films, cartoons, advertising, happy lovers are everywhere. Why? Do you also kiss while your ice cream is melting?.. From Yandex.Images I like to use Maslow’s pyramid of needs as an example as an explanation. Maslow distributed the needs as they increase, explaining this structure by the fact that a person cannot experience high-level needs while he needs more primitive things. The basis is physiology (quenching hunger, thirst, sexual need, etc.). A step higher is the need for security, above it is the need for affection and love, as well as for belonging to a social group. The next step is the need for respect and approval, above which Maslow placed cognitive needs (thirst for knowledge, desire to perceive as much information as possible). Next comes the need for aesthetics (the desire to harmonize life, fill it with beauty and art). And finally, the last step of the pyramid, the highest, is the desire to reveal inner potential (this is self-actualization). It is important to note that each of the needs does not have to be satisfied completely - partial saturation is enough to move to the next stage. The development of society would have reached its peak long ago if we were not constantly hampered by imposed desires. I’m not talking now about a universal conspiracy, Big Brother and other paranoia, but it is worth remembering that “if you are paranoid, this does not mean that you are not being watched.” If you look at the planetary scale, such a “slowdown” of development only awaits those lagging behind. Well, industry and cunning businessmen manage to put together capital, while the whole planet is waiting for some to reach the point where one can be satisfied with a cheese sandwich for breakfast, and not dream of red caviar, and a rented apartment is also housing for this wonderful life 😉 While some take pictures next to other people's cars, others discover downshifting. From Yandex.Images Accept what you have - with gratitude! And you will get more. How does it work? Let's return to the example of personal life. The modern world is such that strong, bright sides are demonstrated. And the dark ones are not shown. And every manifestation of the ordinary life of ordinary people causes a wave of reactions in the world. I wrote about this in the article “Self-Love and Emotional Intelligence.” It's bad to be bad. It's bad to be sad. Is it bad to be... alive and real?.. On social networks, we seem to have stepped out of the pages of fairy tales - but if fairy tales existed as an alternative reality of ordinary life with its pain and suffering, now, trying to be the heroes of these fairy tales, we suppress in ourselves something that you haven’t learned to master. All conditionally negative reactions. So it turns out that the Instagram prince meets the Instagram princess - and behind the credits, where ordinary life begins in a fairy tale, the prince and princess have quarrels, scandals and, in the end, divorce. We do not value what we have , because we don’t see reality. And we don’t see reality, because we either constantly think about the past, which did not meet our expectations (we did not behave as required by our ideal image or others - it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that a person lives there , where his attention is) or we come up with a future for ourselves - a new fairy tale, in essence. By the way, about fairy tales - those that we know and tell to our children - are adapted to modern flimsy minds. Scenes of execution and violence were cut out from fairy tales of the 17th-19th centuries. To verify this, remember or find on the Internet the original texts of Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood. Life as it is appears in the original texts. Dina Goldstein Fallen Princesses, photo project How not to get stuck in the past, not fantasize about the future and live in the present? Developing.