How to stay cheerful and positive if you live in the province?

Jekaterina Malaya, Analyst

I would probably come up with some kind of occupation that would distinguish my life from others living nearby. I would buy sticks for Nordic walking and walk around the city at 5 in the morning … I would do everything beautifully in my apartment. I planted pink petunias on the balcony. If I had money, I would open a coffee shop of 10 sq. m, poured coffee to customers, asking: “How do you like it as usual?” It would open at 6 in the morning, close at 12, having sold out all the hot rolls … I would imagine that I live in some kind of Ubenburen.

I am subscribed to the Instagram of one farmer who left Kiev for 80 km to the village, where he and his family started a farm, but this is such a “hipster” farm. They bake bread, make cheeses, pickles, jams… Bread is baked in the oven, packaged beautifully, arugula is grown in the greenhouse, jam is made with cinnamon, not just cherry. Now they even go to them from Kiev for these “eco-goods”, but behind the fence lives Baba Masha and Grandfather Mikola with a red nose, whose children, as if from fire, fled from this dull village to the big city. In general, you can live beautifully and not dull everywhere.

Alexander Mikhaylovsky, creative director

You are a secret agent who, under the witness protection program, was taken to such a remote place where even the news is learned there through signal lights, burning garbage and tires. But even here your skills and talents will come in handy, because under the veil of the provincial, skeletons are worse than those in megacities. Bring to clean water and stop the collapse of public services, fill the road mafia with asphalt and put it on the shelves for justice to the shameless bureaucrats from the mayor’s office. Do you have enough strength, experience and perseverance? Let’s see…

Alexander Grothendieck, student

Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who is considered one of the founders of existentialism, wrote about it this way: “The doors of happiness, unfortunately, do not open inwards – then they could be dissolved by violent pressure – but from within.”

When you realize that your happiness depends entirely on you and your attitude to things, then you will have a continuous good mood. Nobody and nothing can make a person unhappy. Instructive is the myth of Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, who not only was born and vegetated in the province (the city of Hieropolis), but, even worse, he was born into slavery. Accompanying his master to lectures on philosophy, he learned to meditate and became a philosopher himself. Once the owner, being in a playful mood, began to beat him on the leg with a stick – well, you understand, there was no Internet and television then, but you want to have fun. And he hit with full force. Epictetus looks at the owner and says: “If you continue to beat me like that, you will break my leg.” Would it stop you? Of course not. Therefore, the owner hit him on the leg several more times and still broke his leg. Epictetus, without even changing his face, says: “I told you that you would break.” The owner was so amazed by this that he gave him freedom. Epictetus disposed of freedom with dignity – he became a Stoic philosopher. Here is an example of the ideas he preached:

“The main task of philosophy is to teach us to distinguish between what we can do. But our thoughts, aspirations, and, consequently, our happiness are subject to us.”

Based on the experience of communicating with people from all over Russia, I can say that there is nothing wrong with the provinces – for example, a large number of the best translators with whom I work are from there. And they are in no way inferior to those from Moscow or St. Petersburg, and in perseverance and achieving goals, they can even give odds. In my opinion, the province is more opportunities for creating something of your own, something that you can do with your own hands or with your head; in the province, due to its remoteness, people in the process of self-development (if, of course, they are engaged in this) become original and interesting. The capital is an opportunity to get into some big / prestigious company or to find, if possible, some interesting connections. But at the same time, the capital often emasculates people: everyone becomes approximately the same, not only outside, but also inside. You need to have great internal immunity so as not to lose yourself and start chasing the crowd or party. You need to look for positive and cheerfulness not in the capitals, but in yourself.

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Igor Pimenov, IT department employee

Not watching the news (so as not to unnecessarily overwhelm yourself with negativity, because there is rarely anything good in the news), give up social networks (so as not to see someone’s better life), find entertainment, preferably without harm to health after work, and get a cat. The last one is optional.

Dany Chernoguz, art director

You have to be a philology graduate, listen to radical depressive music, play something like punk rock, play Doom and Civilization, selflessly read thick philosophical books, drink budget port wine with friends in nature (discussing selected issues of culture and religion), be in difficult and complicated personal relationships, having very vivid and realistic dreams, and being something in their twenties.

Sergei Malchenko, lawyer

To paraphrase Professor Preobrazhensky: “The province is not outside the Moscow Ring Road, but in the minds.” There is no guarantee that a person, having arrived in Moscow or St. Petersburg, will necessarily become a cheerful positive optimist, sometimes such a person becomes an even greater pessimist. I believe that any person can be cheerful and positive, regardless of where they live, it is enough to be inquisitive, not to stop there and find beauty even in ordinary objects and phenomena.

It is not a place that colors a person, but a person a place.

Evgeny Yakovlev, psychologist-consultant, business coach

Now I travel a lot: work and study. And for seven years he worked in the villages (regional centers) as an obstetrician-gynecologist, and if it were not for family circumstances, he could have worked there at least all his life. If we do what we like, what we know how to do, this is a big piece of happiness. If at the same time everything is fine in a relationship and there is an opportunity to earn money – what else do you need?

Shaul Reznik, copywriter, translator

Let’s aggravate the initial conditions, thereby simplifying them. You are a revolutionary in a tsarist prison (not in the Gulag, where they cut wood around the clock, but in a prison where there is a lot of free time and bars). What were the revolutionaries doing there? That’s right – self-education. In the age of the Internet – and in freedom – you can learn, for example, programming languages, and then look for orders on the relevant freelance sites. Upgrade your skills – move from a province to a non-province.

Roman Galaktionov, engineer

It is very easy to answer this question. I followed this answer two weeks ago. Leave and don’t come back. There is no need to live where you feel bad. and invent ways to make yourself feel better so you can keep living. Leaving is hard, scary, in my case it was connected with the tragedy in general, and I still cannot survive it. But you have to leave.

See the original answer at Online TheQuestion service.