Kalle Flodin is a young Swedish man who moved to the backwoods of his country to renovate and live in a cabin with his girlfriend and two huskies. His Youtube channel popped up on my feed, and I’ve watched a few of his episodes but it doesn’t really grab me all that much. However, today I saw one of his episodes with a title that made me somewhat curious. The episode is called, ‘Living my Dream Life but still Unhappy’.
This short video is an excellent example of someone who gets what they think they want but is still floundering in their life.
In a nutshell, Kalle is unhappy and he doesn’t know why. A visit to his therapist, (in of itself a grim warning that the poor lad is not on the right track), provides him with an exercise to write down where he sees himself in five years. How profound. It’s like these therapists have a playbook of about three pages; so that’s one page for every year at university I suppose.
He does the exercise but decides to take it one step further. He also writes down a list of what he would have wished for in his dream life if he had done the same exercise five years ago. Unsurprisingly, this results in him wishing for everything that he has now – a cabin in the woods, a girlfriend, some dogs, and his dream job of making videos for internet consumption.
So in other words, he got everything that he wanted and he’s still not happy. You can see the quiet desperation in his eyes. His solution going forward to be able to deal with the fact that he is unhappy is to live more in the moment. I seem to have come across this phrase many times in my life from many different people in the same situation. It is on a similar level to phrases such as, ‘enjoy life’, ‘be free to be who you are’, and many other meaningless platitudes.
‘Living in the moment’ is the eternal empty excuse of the secular mind. He doesn’t know how to break the cycle of unhappiness. His solutions are to try and come up with things that he is grateful for and to go see his therapist once a week. Oh, and for his internet community to each think of three things that each of them are grateful for so they can all be unhappily happy together.
This is a life without God. It is a life that becomes emptier with each passing day. It has no meaning because deep down inside these people realise that there is no point to it all. That is why he is unhappy. Why is he in that cabin in the woods? There is no mention of making a family with his girlfriend, of marrying her and having children. He is treading water and he knows it but he doesn’t know what to do about it.
In that sort of life, each day begins as a quiet burden. I’ve been there, I know. There is no material object that he can wish for that will ease this crushing anxiety. He is unhappy because he is spiritually empty. We are made up of the physical and the spiritual, so if you neglect the spiritual you are going to find yourself on the plain of desolation. He got what he thought that he wanted and it didn’t help him at all. And the truly awful thing about his five year exercise is that he realises that what he hopes to have in five years’ time won’t help him any more than what he has now.
Which means that the next five years will be for nothing. Time wasted, nothing gained. As I said in this week’s podcast, I am alone but I am not lonely. My spiritual journey continues and that is the thing for which I am most grateful. A man without a spiritual journey looks but does not see, hears but does not listen, acts but does not know why.
Pray for this man. I know that if he was blessed with God’s grace that his world would completely change. That would be a real five year plan.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.