Save Your Emotional Health: The Costs of Not Following Your Dreams

When I was a younger man, I wanted to drive hydroplanes. It was what I wanted to do for a living, and hydroplanes were then (and are now) one of my dearest passions. My then wife told me that if I followed that dream, she would divorce me. As my children have since pointed out to me, she divorced me anyway - so I should have followed my dream. They're right, I should have. I am too old now to even consider trading the stability I have where I work now for a 20 year olds job where I would likely not ever make any money. And until only recently, the dreams that I left behind for certain people and for the sake of absolute stability had put me in a state of emotional despair. I have a new dream, involving retirement in a place where joy is the emotion of the day, and it might even include a yacht of some kind. The fact that I wasted so many years not enjoying my life is the reason for writing this article today. There are costs to not following your dreams. Emotional costs, financial costs and health costs. Between my personal experiences, those I found on the web, and a few personal interviews with friends and family, I suggest that we now peruse the 3 major costs of not following your dreams.

Cost number one: Your happiness. Yes, there are more important things than your immediate happiness. In fact, most things are more important than your immediate happiness. But when you have dreamed since childhood of becoming an astronaut and you throw it away because your significant other demands a job that keeps your feet on the ground, you may be throwing away your only chance of real happiness. Approach your significant other about your dream job before marriage, if at all possible. Explain the significance and ask for their honest input on your dreams. If they think that who you are working to become is stupid, childish, or silly, you may be marrying the wrong person - which in and of itself will toss your happiness right out the window. Leaving the dream of who you intend to be or want to be on the shelf for somebody else will inevitably cause stress in your relationship, will cause unhappiness for both of you and will ultimately end in bitterness for both of you. Take it from somebody who knows.

Cost number two: Your physical health. When you are doing something that you absolutely loathe doing, you are going to damage your health doing it. When the only reward to getting up in the morning is the house that you don't feel that you need and the car that you didn't really want to begin with, every single expense becomes too much. Every single dollar you watch slip away with movie night or eating fast food or trying to keep your relationship together is one more dollar you have to earn to get yourself away from the job you so hate commuting to every morning. I interviewed my father in law, who worked in the computer industry for many, many years about this exact issue. When he was a younger man, he dreamed of being a psychologist. His wife, on the other hand, intended on a more stable, family type job and insisted he go to school for computers. He did, and even now considers going back to school to become the psychologist he always wanted to become. He said, "when I was working in the computer industry, I felt like I was putting out fires all the time. I was constantly tired. I hated my work, and I could never seem to get away from it." His pay never made up for his desire to live and work his dream to complete fulfillment. My other father in law (my wife's parents are divorced) has expressed the same concern. "I work 6 to 7 days a week, for somebody I don't like or trust. I wish I could travel back in time and shake myself by the shoulders. If I could tell myself one thing, it would be to stop being an employee and start being the employer. That's what I've always wanted to do. Run my own company. How did thirty years go by? What happened?"

Cost number 3: Your desire to follow other dreams. When you are getting toward the end of your life and you look back, will you see that you found ways over the hurdles in your path, or will you see that you were always diverted to another, less fulfilling road by somebody who meant to keep you in check, rather than help you succeed? After you've been diverted from one major dream, believe me, I understand how easy it is to simply forget about other dreams. If you can't have what you really want, then certainly nobody will allow you to have what you only care about a little bit, right? Wrong. As painful as it might be to give up on one dream, if you've done it then you've done it and sometimes there really is no going back. Go on with your life and find a new dream. Accomplish it this time and don't let anybody tell you that your dreams are childish, silly, stupid or wrong (as long as what you want to do is not against the law).

Giving up on your dreams is one of the most life sucking things you can do to yourself. If you have the opportunity, or think that it may be possible to build the opportunity to do so, then go after that dream that you've had since childhood and make it happen. If you absolutely cannot follow that dream, then find a new one. Just do whatever it is that brings joy to your life. You can't afford not to.