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Once upon a time, human beings needed to be highly emotional. Our capacity for fear, joy, spurious belief, conclusion-jumping, and rage were integral to our survival: that's why we have these traits.

We humans and our cultures evolved in a world very different from the world many of us inhabit now: many of us have access to great luxuries, coupled with an excess of time in which to enjoy ourselves.

Why, then, do we find it so difficult to feel at peace with our circumstances?

The negative aspects of our old survival drives can drag behind us like a ball and chain as we do our best to move through our lives. We're often more emotional than is good for us, leading us to feel unnecessary pains and create unnecessary divides between ourselves and others. This works directly against the goal most of us have: obtaining inner peace.

So, then, how are we to reconcile our feral, combative, internal drives with the organized, safe, and systematic society we inhabit? How can we stay human while dropping our excess baggage - how can we know what baggage to drop?

We all want to feel okay with everything. Most of us don't realize we lack inner peace, or don't know what inner peace even feels like. What we figure, most of the time, is that obtaining this-or-that material good will contribute to our inner sense of peacefulness: once we "have" enough, we can relax.

Here's the truth: once our basic needs are met (food, water, clothing, shelter, entertainment, sleep, and social interaction), we already "have" enough stuff. The rest of the work needed to obtain inner peace is, predictably, internal: we must sculpt our mental habits, cherishing the outlook that everything really is okay already. There are many ways to do this. Never let anyone tell you that you can't have control over your own mental states!

1) Stay in the moment.

We now have the luxury, at least in more wealthy countries, to refrain from clamoring for the next meal. This frees up a lot of time, and in that time, an untrained "monkey mind" is likely to focus itself on the first thing to come along: a more expensive car or apartment, a workplace crush, a confrontation with a roommate that took place last week, or maybe a coming dentist's appointment. Subjects like these roll around in our heads all day, distracting us from the present, in which few bad things, and many potentially interesting things, are happening around us.

We don't need let our monkey-minds monkey around: it's a long-ingrained self-defense

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