The Pursuit of Happiness: 50 Observations on Living Well
152: Happiness is a practice... Not the final destination.
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Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. - Thomas Jefferson
The beauty of life only becomes apparent once you realize you have all the power. From influencing your thoughts throughout the day to figuring out not only how to live your life. But how to actually get the most out of it. At some point, you realize we are all in an eternal pursuit of happiness or unhappiness. Happiness is a practice. Living in a way that feels true to yourself and aligned with your values. Unhappiness? Living life by someone else's definition. This post? Observations from our own experience to help you live a more full… Happier life.
Whenever you wonder who has it all figured out when it comes to happiness…
The answer is children. High energy, curiosity, experiencing novelty at all times, and having no self-imposed limitations. All that mixed with spontaneity. It is a formula that most adults could learn from and apply to their lives.
Finding meaningful work that connects to your inner desires and personality will bring you unlimited happiness. You won’t be able to sleep at night and won’t be able to wait to wake up in the morning to work on it. It is an underrated sign that you are doing something right with your life. Not sure where to start? List the few things that always make time pass quickly. Got it? Perfect. Now list what all three share. There is a pattern you are not yet aware of.
The environment is the underrated aspect of happiness. You want to put YOURSELF in environments that align with who you are (or who you want to become). People, items, living space, places where you spend your free time, and the weather outside. It all matters. Because sooner or later, you become exactly what you spend most of your time on and what you associate with.
A big reason people are unhappy with their lives? They have never been taught anything other than asking others for permission to do what they want. Parents, teachers, your boss. None of them matter, and neither should you seek their approval for anything or think they know something better than you do. They don’t.
Your parents are wonderful people. They did everything they could to ensure you could live the life you are living right now. Yet you should be aware that you should not spend most of your time optimizing for the decision that will make them happy. Doing everything you can to fulfill their vision of you. It is one of those lifestyle traps that no one ever talks about.
Turn the news off. Stop opening news websites. It has been designed to make you emotional (angry) and to keep you hooked so they can sell more digital advertising space. The attention economy’s main idea is to spike emotions and keep you unhappy.
The most direct way to increase your happiness is to stop comparing yourself to others and to put full effort into everything you do each day. Unfortunately, it is not taken seriously because it sounds like any other self-help book or tweet.
Happiness has become a performance metric. You spend every minute of your day trying to maximize your sleep score, planning perfect morning routines, and keeping a full calendar. Long-term results of that? Unhappiness. Because happiness alone doesn’t come from over-optimization... It is not a KPI.
Money will have a huge impact on your happiness when you don’t have enough. Once you do have enough, you will realize that you cannot solve all your problems with it. Paradox. This is when you realize it makes life easier, but optimizing everything you do and sacrificing yourself is rarely worth it after a point.
The REAL definition of quality of life is nothing but maximizing the utility of your remaining time on this planet. It is the same reason you should not cheap out on the things that improve your life, help you perform better, or put a smile on your face that you can’t take off.
What most people get wrong throughout their lives is thinking they will wake up one morning and figure out what happiness means to them. That is wrong. The only way to know what happiness means to you is to pursue it actively. Try new things. See what you are already doing that is not working. Audit. Try new things. Audit more... One day you will figure out YOUR definition of happiness.
The easiest way to do this is to write out a list of the things that are not high risk and that you want to try over the next 6 months. Just by DOING one from the list each month. You will not be able to ignore the results and the difference you will feel.
Your happiness level is determined by your schedule. The more obligations you have to do for others, not because you want to do them. Or the ones that don’t give you any sense that you owe them or would do of your own free will... The more frustrated you will be.
Ancient Greeks were the ones who figured out what happiness is all about. Happiness is not about feeling good or being in a permanent state of euphoria (yet we should strive for it). Happiness is about living well in line with your principles and morals. The more true you are to yourself, the happier you will feel.
The quality of the relationships you build with the people you find inspiring will do more for your happiness than anything else. Humans are social creatures, and the more we detach ourselves from this, the more miserable we feel. To win at this game, you need to build your tribe.
To work on yourself for the good of others is a smart way to receive the best from life for yourself. - G.I. Gurdjieff
There is a big misconception that happiness can (and should) be pursued. That is wrong. What you can pursue (and YOU should) is purpose. Why you are doing the things you are doing. What is the reason behind it? How it makes you feel. If you don’t have a REAL reason for doing it... You will never achieve it.
Happiness is earned. It should not be treated as a default state. It requires effort and time. The healthiest benchmark is your approach and how you handle the small things. Becoming more optimistic year over year is the progress you are after.
Do yourself a favor and learn to stop overestimating how much happiness material things will bring you. They do for a day or two… Maybe a week if it was something you really wanted. Yet when you compare them to experiences or lifelong memories, they end up being nothing. Waste of your time.
Happiness is directly connected to your ability to move on. Bad relationships, bad circles, a job you hate, a life you don’t want to live anymore. The more freedom you have, the better you will feel.
Never underestimate the power of sleep and going to bed early. It is one of the factors in your life that never makes sense until it is too late and your body is breaking down. There is not a single aspect of your life that will not improve once you start taking care of your sleep. This also applies to your outlook on the world and to how you approach things, whether positively or negatively. Have trouble falling asleep? A few days of morning sunlight and you will be a different person.
Dopamine detox and having a clear mind are an unfair advantage when it comes to how you feel and see the world. The whole movement of people making themselves bored (on purpose) is not as crazy as it sounds. You just have to notice the effect on yourself, and it is a game-changer.
Without a proper set of daily habits (activities, tasks, goals...) that you find beneficial for your quality of life, you will be playing the happiness-pursuit game on hard mode. Or you might never reach it at all. You just need to pick a path of least friction and build on top of it. Forget about giving yourself big ideas and thinking you will stick to them. Forget about running every day. Start by walking for 10 minutes each day and build from there.
Having coffee outside in nice weather with the people you GENUINELY care about might not be the permanent fix for the situation you are in. But it will definitely be the temporary option that makes your journey easier.
Gratitude is the foundation of your pursuit. Only a few can shift their attention from a lack of sufficiency to the things they already have and that are present in their lives. It is also the most powerful tool you can have against the hedonic treadmill and against becoming a victim of it.
It doesn’t take much reading of history to realize that all of us are living superior lives to our ancestors. You also realize that people are happiest doing what they are naturally good at. Not something imposed on them, but something they have found themselves (an event, an experience...) and fallen in love with. Ikigai principles align with this as well.
A hard pill to swallow is that if you are stuck in survival mode, worrying about bills or whether you will have enough money to put food on the table. Your ability to find happiness will be limited. Simply because most of your time will be spent figuring out how to get out. Never being able to reflect on what you already have and why you are in a perfect position to turn your life around.
One clear indicator that you are winning on your happiness journey is that you never want to retire and take it easy. You don’t even want to think about it. No one operating at 110% (aligned with their beliefs) is counting the days until they retire. It is something much deeper that most never experience, and a clear indicator of whether you have found your source of happiness.
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Pay an enormous amount of attention to the things that give you joy and a feeling of aliveness. Once you have a clear sense of what they are, the next step is to incorporate them into your routine and repeat them over and over again... Until they become part of your reality and something you do without even thinking. The ability to recognize them and incorporate them will pay off with massive dividends in the long run.
The first step in your pursuit of happiness is self-acceptance and knowing who you are. If you are unhappy in your own skin, everything else is a massive waste of time.
Walking in nature is one of the cheapest and most effective tools you can use to improve your mood. Not to mention anything else that comes with it... Your health improves. Your creativity improves. Your quality of life improves as a result. If you are not taking 10k steps a day, this should be your #1 priority.
One of the happiest archetypes among the people you will meet is the curious type. Those who, no matter their age, are still looking for the answers to the questions that interest them. Always looking for something new, realizing there is another stone to turn. Knowing that there is no end to it and that their curiosity will only lead them to the next side quest. Those are some of the happiest people you will encounter in life.
The word “no” and learning how to use it in everyday life carries an enormous impact on your happiness. You cannot be happy if you are afraid to say “no” to the things you don’t want to do.
Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. - Slavoj Žižek
Aliveness is the closest thing to a describable feeling of happiness. When you are so deep into something that you are unable to tell what time it is, what the weather outside is like, or what you have eaten for lunch that day. It is an underrated metric that you are doing something right.
Make it your goal to realize that happiness is a projection of your mind. It is not (and should not be) dependent on external conditions. It is not dependent on your material possessions either. It is your default state that you have NOT used since you were a kid.
Life works in seasons. If you are curious about what it means and how it relates to happiness, the same idea applies. Expecting to be optimistic year round should be your goal. But goals and reality are not the same thing. The good news is that you only need 3 to 4 months that work in your favor to call it a good year.
Your gut might or might not play a role in your happiness, hormones, and how you feel overall. Taking care of it and optimizing it further made a difference for us. Just something to keep in mind. Maybe those "gut is the second brain" memes might be real.
The two most important days of your life are the day you are born, and the day you discover why. The more you think about it, the more sense it makes (Mark Twain was right… again).
A key component of happiness is recognizing that it is nothing but a byproduct of the long-term positive effects of life experiences. The more of those positive life experiences you have, the closer you live to your true self. Not what others have pictured for you or what society told you was right. The easier it will be for you to stay in a phase where you are satisfied with yourself and what you are doing with your life.
Identify the 3 core areas of your life that bring you the most happiness (relationships, meaningful work, health...). Now set everything else aside and ask yourself how different your life would look if you didn’t have those. There is a good chance you realize that 80% of your happiness comes from those, and that this is a clear sign you should make them your priority.
A solid indicator that you are doing things right in your life and operating above your normal baseline of happiness is looking forward to waking up tomorrow.
The higher your intelligence baseline level, the harder you will have to work to find mechanisms that will allow you to be happy. It is hard to maintain a happy state when you spend most of your time analyzing how complex everything around you is and still being at peace with it.
There is a good chance that MOST of your happiness will come down to just one specific change. Losing weight. Not drinking alcohol anymore. Getting rid of the people you know are bad for you. If you are one of the lucky ones who recognize what is holding you back and you remove it… You will achieve it.
There is a big difference between the morning routines people spend hours optimizing and the ones they actually enjoy and look forward to. You don’t want to fall for the first one.
Most people spend their whole lives searching for happiness, only to realize that most of it comes from the same things they enjoyed since childhood. There is a clear connection between your past and where you are now. Yet most never think about it. The reason you were not able to let that book go when you were 6 might be the same reason you enjoy reading right now. Being able to recognize a few of those patterns and apply them to your current situation will do a lot for you.
Never underestimate the fun aspect of your life. What it brings, and what role fun plays when it comes to your happiness level. There is a good chance that you’re just one or two hobbies away from feeling what you never had before.
Positive psychology in the performative era. Worth your time…
To appreciate the state of happiness and the pursuit of it. It will only start to make sense once you experience the pain and suffering. C.S. Lewis explains it best in his books The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed.
No one tells you in life that there is a good kind of fear and a bad one. The good kind of fear. One that when practiced often, will make you start to appreciate everything you have. It doesn’t take a genius to realize the impact on your state of happiness.
Learning how to control your emotions is more than half of the battle. All of us have days when we are not feeling it, when we are confused, or when we are angry. What our goal in the pursuit of happiness should be is to understand that decisions should not be made based on those emotions. The same way you should never promise something you don't really mean when you are in a state of euphoria and happiness.
The most overlooked source of happiness is having someone waiting for you at home while you are out there working hard. Never take it for granted. There is something special about having someone you can count on and who is happily waiting for you. It is one of those small joys of life you have to recognize before it is too late.
The pursuit of happiness is NOT about getting to a permanent level of happiness. It is about learning to appreciate the smallest things you already have that make life beautiful. It is our duty to make the most out of it and help others make the most out of theirs.
Disclaimer: None of this is to be legal or financial advice of any kind.