In less than three weeks, the first year of the second decade of the 21st century will be over.
What a ride. It’s been such an insane year, at times it felt like it was never going to end, and during others it flew by.

The world hasn’t collectively experienced a calendar year together in a long time. Meaning, normally each country experiences a year’s ups and downs in a way that’s unique to their own circumstances.
2020 however, was the year that the planet experienced it together.
The last time such a thing occurred was during WWII.

Everyone suffered through the same ordeals together.
The loved ones lost, the economies and jobs shattered, and the depression rates that skyrocketed during lockdown, all were shared by millions of people around the world.

There was a trend for a while where people were posting what their new year resolutions were at the end of 2019.
In some videos, it was great material for some humor, in others though, it was a different story.

People’s expectations were completely thrown out the window as the year went on, from one disaster to the next.

So, looking back, how can we better prepare ourselves for next year?

Hardship is most often connected to growth. That is the harsh reality of life. Where there is pain, there is maturity. The more arduous and difficult your life is, the stronger and more resilient you become.

2020 was in many ways a torrid year for so many, but we shouldn’t end the story there. We can’t let just pass by without us at least trying to take advantage of what happened. We have to at least try, to get something beneficial out of everything that transpired these last twelve months.

Over the course of this and the next two articles, we will go through some ideas that can help us become more readily suited for another 2020.

For starters, we need to set a ground rule when thinking about what we can learn. A framework so to speak that permits us to properly analyze the events that occurred.

Simply put, not everything bad can be beneficial, and bad things happening is okay.
It may seem like it contradicts what was previously stated, but to a certain limit, bad things that happen to you, sometimes happen because this is the world we live in.
This is the reality we have, and it’s sometimes a waste of energy and time to try and find a use out of every possible bad thing that happens to us.

It’s sometimes more important to move on and accept that life is difficult.

Society can mislead us into being confused with the quantity of happiness one should expect to have in their lives. Movies, novels and advertisements give an illusion of a simpler easier life, and that causes us to expect more out of it, therefore we become more depressed when those expectations are unfulfilled.
The truth is, we had no business having such high expectations in the first place, and it’s vital to know exactly how to manage our expectations.


It’s not exactly a cheerful idea, but it will protect us from a lot of unnecessary heartache and will give us so much more time and energy for other more positive or useful ways to spend our lives.