The Best Days of Our Lives!

Ever wonder what when "the best days of our lives" are?

Did they happen at some point in the past? Or are they still out in the future, perhaps waiting around the next corner?

Life is a funny thing. We often spend a lot of time mired down in what is going wrong in our world... sometimes even while life is actually pretty good!

For many many years, I used to tell people that "my good old days are still AHEAD of me!"

I said it mostly because I found it extremely difficult to find any points in my past that were worth remembering fondly, and most of the time my present was a spiky ball of toxic stress.

Maybe I was being excessively fatalistic, but I often would answer "pretty much any time that is not NOW" in response to the question about when I was happiest.

One of the ironies is that at least one period during which I was having a pretty good life was also one where most people outside myself would describe as the most dysfunctional!

I was relatively freshly separated, soon to be divorced, having moved from a nice house in the city to a small 1-bedroom apartment, and I mostly stayed at home, exploring they earliest versions of the Internet.

I got to know a group of somewhat diverse people online, and we would get together and travel in a group to "do stuff" in locations like Las Vegas, Denver and Seattle.

Most of us were actually happy. Perhaps because we were pretty carefree, had turned our backs on corporate jobs and ambition, and pretty much could care less what "the world" thought about our pursuits.

We explored and reveled in the fact that our "virtual" friendships were often far more real and authentic than the rest of the world's actual friendships.

This all took place before all the posers and social media took over the web, and reduced life to unrealistic highlight reels of lives that didn't actually exist.

I blame MySpace. Not Facebook, MySpace... they came before Facebook...

In a sense, we were the OGs of the social Internet. Mainstreamers thought we were absolutely nuts and engaged in "dangerous behavior."

In reality, you were more at risk while picking up a case of beer from your local convenience store than you would have been, joining one of our excursions...

In retrospect, many of "best days" have been the ones between coming up with some really appealing idea for a project to take on and bring to the world... and "reality" intervening and making that project go horribly wrong.

Some of the best days of my life were when I decided to be a professional beach comber, selling the things I found to artists and craftspeople all over the world! For two — almost three — amazing years I got to do something I loved, and made enough of a living at it to pay all my bills, eat rather well, travel a bit and even pay off my credit cards.

The some bright spark of a journalist decided it would be a good "Sunday colour story" to write about "some guy" who was carving out a living as a beach comber and supplier of "found objects" to people all over the world.

Another two years and there were so many copycats, and the beaches had been picked clean, and nobody was able to make even some extra pocket money, anymore.

That's what I mean by "things going horribly wrong."

But that's just humanity. If people think that someone else has something they don't have, they will go about destroying it... even if they are not knowingly aware that it's what they are doing.

Hopefully, I still have some "best days" ahead! Along with some "best people!"

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great rest of your week!

How about YOU? Do you think the best days of your life are behind you? Or are they going to happen sometime in the future? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2025.08.12 01:13 PDT
x979/2213