Just one more minute until I’m done with this class. Just one more hour until I’m done with this work shift. Just one more day until I’m done with high school. Just one more year until I graduate college.”

These are phrases that I have said many times before, and their use is not uncommon among people in my generation.

Many of us seem to want to speed up time; the future will be so much better than the present. At least that’s what we say to ourselves as we sit through our boring high school classes. We think to ourselves that everything will get better once we go off to college. We will finally be free from our parents, and school is going to be amazing because we will finally be able to study what we want to study. What we do not realize, though, is how much our responsibilities will increase after we leave for school. We do not realize just how much our parents truly did for us while we were living at home until after we leave. There are bills to pay, groceries to shop for and classes to study for because school does not get any easier.

This is not to say that being excited for the future is necessarily a bad thing. It is just bad if we refuse to live in the present because we keep telling ourselves that the future will better. To be honest nobody besides God knows what will happen in the future. As a result of this desire to be at a different point in their lives, many people in our generation have contentment issues. This can cause some people to become depressed because they are so focused on what they do not have that they do not stop and think about what they already have.

In "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone," Dumbledore warns Harry against dwelling too much on dreams and forgetting to live in the present. He tells Harry that people have driven themselves mad by staring at the Mirror of Erised because it shows them the thing that they desire the most, and a lot of times that thing took place in the future.

Lately, I have seen a lot of social media posts from my friends about how they are ready for summer vacation to be over and to go back to school. They are sick and tired of being bored in their parents’ house, and are ready to see their friends from school again. In addition to that, many people are ready for summer to end and fall to begin. They are done with the hot weather and are ready for cooler temperatures to come, even though they were saying the exact opposite during winter and spring.

I have to admit that I, too, have contentment issues but I have recently realized just how bad they can be. Instead of complaining about what we do not have, we need to take some time to stop and think about what we currently have. You will be surprised to see just how much you truly have, right now, in your life and in a few years you will be able to understand why God had you in whatever situation you are currently in. Make a list of everything good and bad in your life, and then you will probably see that the good things outweigh the bad. These are the things that you should be focusing on.

So, next time you are sitting in your college dorm thinking about how you wish you could just be done with college and working at your dream job, stop to think about how amazing your life currently is. Think about your friends, that cute guy across the hall and all of the opportunities that you have been able to have while at school. Thinking about these things might help you to see that your life is not as bad or boring as you thought. If everyone does that then maybe we can eventually become a more content generation.