I mean who doesn't? When people are asked what they value most in their lives, many would say happiness. But what the hell does that even mean? Ice cream makes me happy but I don't think endless tubs of Ben and Jerry's is what most people are looking for (...unless š³?).
Unfortunately, English sucks and there's no real word to describe this thing that many of us are searching for. Some would say happiness, or eudemonia or self-actualization, but the closest word to describing this, in my opinion, is joyful fulfillment.
Okay, then what the hell is joyful fulfillment then? Joyful fulfillment is: being on a journey to your better scenario while being grateful for your worst scenario and being appreciative of your current self . Or how my friend puts it, "Be better than yesterday in the direction towards tomorrow".
Okay, now how do I get some of this joyful fulfillment stuff? I'll expand on this more.
Here's a tip on not feeling like shit. Don't use goals as a means of happiness. Instead make the journey to your goals, the source of your fulfillment. Why? Because goals are an instantaneous point in your life, they can fade and disappear. Instead, a journey contains an infinite number of points of potential happiness, and its something you can rely on to bring you fulfillment.
So what journey should you embark on?
The most counter-intuitive thing about money is that NOBODY wants a million dollars to simply HAVE a million dollars. Everyone wants a million dollars so they can SPEND a million dollars. Money brings freedom of choice.
And so if your goal is to tie yourself to just accumulating wealth, you're just restricting yourself from the freedom you're trying to get! This literally makes no sense because accumulation this the opposite of what brings you happiness which is the freedom and choice of spending money. This is an endless cycle that traps you in dissatisfaction.
If this isn't convincing enough, the effects of wealth fall under the law of diminishing returns. Yes, the change between an income of 25k/yr ā 50k/yr brings a disproportionate amount of happiness. But the change of 100k/yr ā 125k/yr doesn't see the same return because most of your needs that can be bought by money are almost entirely satisfied.
Investing in a journey to accumulate wealth leads you on an endless hedonic treadmill.
Prestige doesn't exist, it's not real, its something we tell each other that makes it seem real. Chasing prestige will make you do things that you don't enjoy. Prestige makes you like the idea of doing something more than actually doing it. Like how Paul Graham puts it "If the job didnāt suck there is no need to make it prestigious." Prestige is a fake value we give to positions to get people to do things.
Ask yourself, if nobody in the firm/office/company existed one day, would you still feel the same about your position? Titles are just constructs relative to other people. If there weren't anyone below or above you, you wouldn't value prestige as much as you do. And you shouldn't.
It's like wealth, you don't care about it once you have it, you care about it when you never did. Prestige traps ambitious people to do things they don't like. Don't fall for it.
The hedonic treadmill a is journey many fall prey to. It is the constant pursuit of pleasure and gratification from the actions you do. I'm sure you can think of people who'd fit this description, perhaps you follow this endless journey as well.
The problem with this journey is that obtaining pleasure doesn't make you feel happier. That the āhappiness boostā doesn't last as long or intense as youād imagine. Why? Because each person has a happiness set point, which refers to oneās genetically determined predisposition for happiness.
The theory of the hedonic treadmill states that regardless of what happens to people, their levels of happiness will eventually return to their baselines. No matter what you do in life, you will eventually average out to baseline happiness.
The catch is when you experience positive reinforcement for a long time you believe that that baseline has shifted up but in reality, your expectations are higher than your reality. Thus a crash hits you hard.
Most people live this way because we live life one step at a time. If that's your approach to life then the ONLY way to maximize happiness is to do the action that brings the most pleasure.
No. That doesn't mean do what you love this very second. It has to be much bigger than that, it has to be this belief that if I don't do [blank], then I'm not comfortable with the world not having it. Do work that you admire, especially if its something that you can look back with fulfillment and say that everything was all worth it in the end.
Whatever you fill in for that [blank] I can bet you it is something that will bring you lasting fulfillment, even if you failed along the way. It is something that will continue to bring your life long-lasting fulfillment even when you've succeeded in bringing it to fruition.
This isn't going to be easy. If it were, there wouldn't be a need for me to write this. But the fact that it is difficult should excite you.
I talked about fulfillment like its some fairy pixie dust that Disney princess godmothers magically sprinkle on you once you've 'found what you love doing'.
It's much easier than that. Fulfilment comes from having a worthy goal, having a challenge getting to the goal and then having a path to overcome that challenge to obtain the goal.
Without a challenge, things seem pointless and trivial. Without a goal, then it is actually pointless and trivial, and without a surmountable process, then its utterly defeating. A balance between all three things brings a boundless amount of fulfillment. Think of the fulfillment when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, or the feeling if you helped pioneered a drug that cured Alzheimer's. The fulfillment stems from an ambitious goal matched with a difficult challenge and the act of surmounting that challenge is what brings you fulfillment.
Pick something that you deeply love, something that you want to wake up doing, and ideally something, once completed, you can look back on with content. Set high standards and ambitious goals, ideally, measurable goals, identify where you might fail, and be grateful for when you do. If you set yourself on the right path here, you're already better off than 90% of what most people are doing right now.
Here's my controversial opinion. If you're living in a 1st world country with a roof over your head with food to eat, water to drink and you're safe, yet you're still unhappy, it is almost 100% a choice (discounting mental illness).
Here's what I mean.
We all know Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I know what you're thinking: "nobody uses Maslow's anymoreeeeee". Chill, I'm using it as a means to show a broader point.
We all know the pyramid with levels of needs that we all wish to obtain to be "happy". Ranked from lowest to highest, basic needs ā safety ā love ā self-respect ā self-actualization. By achieving the lower rungs you can work your way to the top.
The trick to hacking personal happiness is to realize that EVERYTHING above "safety" is purely a mental game. The only thing that is rooted in objective reality within Maslow's is basic needs and security. You are either safe or not safe, you are either fed or starving. You just are or you aren't.
However, you can't objectively rule "how much am I loved" or "do I love myself?". Why? Because they are strictly about your perspective. You can feel loved or you can feel like you love yourself. It doesn't strictly depend on if people ACTUALLY love you or if you ACTUALLY love yourself. You can think everyone hates you yet people love you and vice versa.
Thus the higher levels of Maslow's needs are COMPLETELY within your control and how you see this world. It's not about reality is about your perspective and if you changed your perspective you'd feel a flood of happiness by being grateful for what you have now.
If you live in a 1st world country, you'd most likely have all the bottom runs fulfilled, generally speaking. And so you can MAKE yourself feel happier by changing perspectives.
Imagine if you were a tribal kid in the Congo, and suddenly youāre transformed into your current state. How would you feel? (Other than shock from the event)
You should feel extremely grateful! Like holy shit, I have all that I need!
Why? Because in comparison, you are 10x better than where you were before. Being in a prosperous nation, we don't need to physically experience what it's like to live in a rural village in Congo to empathize with why someone would feel that way. We can just imagine what it would've been like if we put ourselves in the worst possible scenario.
Gratitude changes the perspectives that let you unlock happiness within your emotional state.
Gratitude = The delta between your current state and your conceivable worst-case scenario
Unhappiness comes looking up and fixated on your ābetter stateā
Don't confuse ambition as unhappiness. Ambition is pursuing your better state while having gratitude and excitement looking back and appreciating your worst-case scenario.
Experience what it's like to live in a third world country. The struggles and problems and issues will put you into perspective. For example, coming back from Mexico traveling through rural farm towns puts me into the perspective of how privileged my life is. What made me unhappy before is dwarfed in comparison.
Experience struggle. It'll make you happier ironically.
When people look back 100 years ago, we often critique all the detrimental mistakes we've made in the past. Perhaps its the racial segregation or the child labor or the great wars etc.
Now, what do you think people, 100 years in the future, would regret the most about what we're doing today?
Many might say climate change or racism or whatever. I'd say one of the most detrimental mistakes would be the advent of social media and mass marketing.
I mean just think about it. Marketing ads and social media work by exploiting desire. Right? The whole point of an advertisement is to entice the desire to want a product. You like following people often because you wish you were like them, or because you don't want to be left out. They feed on your desire. What is desire? Desire is unhappiness about your current self. Social media provides you a high bar for the best-case scenario while making you loath your current self. Social media and marketing ads are engineered to make you unhappy. That's how they work.
What's even scarier, is that companies like Google, Facebook, TikTok, Amazon are hiring some of the smartest people in the world and using some of the most powerful algorithms ever designed by humans to stimulate a desire for something you didn't even know you wanted. They're literally manufactoring artificial human unhappiness.
Human's have existed for millennia without social media and we were fine. We weren't dying without it, and so all this unhappiness is completely self-created.
There are a few main reasons why we're insecure.
Fear of rejection from a social group because we rely on others.
-> We don't trust ourselves to fail. Because we might not be able to live when worst comes to worst. We can't survive without current systems and thus if we fail we might get kicked out of the system and we might just die.
We do not compare with ourselves locally we compare ourselves globally
-> Before we had farmers that might grow crops and experience anxiety when they are competing locally. Now we are competing globally. You are constantly seeing the best of the best and thus feeling like shit about yourself.
The entire world motivates people through their insecurities. The entire world works on trying to make you anxious to pushes development. For example, you buy makeup products because you realize without that product you're less happy.
How do you get rid of them?
Realize that you're insignificant. Realize that you don't matter. If you understand that nothing matters naturally you have no responsibility to live up. Since there's no bar to reach, you can never truly disappoint. Why? Because you can't screw up life if you had no purpose, to begin with! This isn't a moral justification but more so a reason for action versus in-action.
If you internalize the pure nihilism here, then you can see how everything dwarfs any insecurities you have with yourself.
Also, try to limit social media use. Seriously, use it for utility, rather than entertainment. Nobody's on their death bed wishing they had spent more time on Instagram. So why should you?
The average of your 5 closest friends is indeed a great descriptor to who you are. If you hang out with pessimists who complain about how miserable their lives are, you will naturally fall into that hole.
We are built to empathize with others, and so those that are habitually complaining about their brutish existence, it will rub on to you the longer you spend with them.
I'm not saying don't help those who need it, but help those who want to make themselves better. Some people enjoy playing victims and choose to be sad because they can stand on moral high grounds. Helping those stand up will just drag you down with them. Be careful.
If you can hit all of these points, you'd live a joyfully fulfilled life that is: being on a journey to your better scenario, while being grateful for your worst scenario and being appreciative of your current self.
I think we all take life a little seriously. Yes, we have once chance at it, but in the end, no one makes it out alive anyway.
I hope this helps you one day as much as it has helped me.