How to be happy 101
Four things:
#1: Realize that happiness is just a concept.
It’s only real in the sense that a concept like “freedom” is real to those locked in a cage.
Once you get out of the cage, you don’t care about the cage anymore.
If you’re on fire, being not-on-fire is a really big deal. A person who is not engulfed in flames doesn’t go around thinking about how not-on-fire they are.
Same with happiness, freedom, confidence, abundance, etc. Most of the things people think they want are mirages.
People don’t really want to “be happy.” They want to stop being unhappy.
#2: To stop being unhappy, look at the source of your unhappiness and reconcile the inner conflict.
I will give you a hint. It’s one out of two things:
Wanting to change something about yourself
Wanting to change something about the world
It’s always some version of being in conflict with what you are experiencing.
Here’s an example:
A person wants a relationship so they can feel loved, so they can be happy. Pretty standard stuff.
A few problems with this lol.
You can never directly experience someone else’s feelings. In other words, you can’t feel someone else’s love. You only use them to give yourself permission to love yourself. The happiness you seek is in your own expression of love, not theirs.
Many people just want someone to love them so they can allow themselves to love those parts of them that they don’t like. They use the relationship to get out of conflict with themselves.
In this example you see how when you’re wanting to change your external circumstances (whether about money, relationships, etc), you’re really trying to get out of an internal conflict.
Whether you want to change something about yourself or something about the world, it’s always an internal conflict.
#3: Emotions are like rooms
When you are inside of them, they set up the boundaries of your experience.
You can only see the objects that are inside the room.
Every thought and action gets filtered through the emotional state.
This is why when we get angry, we want everyone else to be angry too. We want other people to feel what we feel.
We try to get as many people as possible into our room so we can justify our experience.
We often feel like we are the rooms. Like you’d say “I am angry” instead of “I feel angry.”
We often forget that emotions come and go. When you’re in them, they feel like they’re all that ever was and ever will be.
Even when we look out of the window of the room, our perception is distorted. We don’t see clearly until we step OUT of the room.
If you are fearful, angry, and unhappy, that is all you are going to see in the world.
When you see fearful and destructive things in the world, you think you feel bad because of those external circumstances.
So you think, if only this would change, then I would be happy.
This is how you initiate a conflict with the world.
In fact, this is the heart of violence.
Wanting to change something about the world is the essence of violence.
The good news is, if you want to be happy, you don’t have to change the world.
You just have to step outside of the room.
The question I always get here is “but if I let go of wanting to change the world, then won’t I just be a selfish asshole who only thinks about themselves?”
First of all… you’re already being a selfish asshole by trying to manipulate external circumstances so YOU can be happy, instead of dealing with your shit directly.
Second of all… constantly waging war against the world takes up a TON of energy. All that stress and anxiety is eating away your life force.
Once you free that energy up, you’ll have a lot more energy available to give the best you got in whatever pursuit you choose, which may include helping others.
“Leave the world alone. There is no one or nothing to change but self.”
~Neville Goddard
#4: Play a game
I saw Alex Becker post something on FB recently where he said something along the lines of “Every moment you’re wasting not building a business you can scale to $100mm+ is time you won’t get to enjoy the fruits of your labor.”
His point is that if you’re an entrepreneur, and that’s something you want to do, there’s no time to fuck around. “Most entrepreneurs only have 4 big swings before they’re 50.”
Someone in the comments said “And money will still never buy happiness.”
To which Alex replied: “The point of playing a game is to win. I didn’t say anything about happiness.”
It’s struck me many times how people who are doing big things simply DO NOT CARE about happiness. It’s just not a factor in how they operate.
This ties back to point #1: They understand happiness is a concept that only exists for unhappy people.
Unhappy people often don’t wanna work, build, or create. They are in such conflict with everything they experience that they just want to hide from the world. They think happiness is in seeking pleasure and escape.
So they seek pleasure and escape, until they wind right back up in their own lives again.
Happy people, on the other hand, are often happy to eat dirt if it means making progress toward something meaningful.
Like changing the world, maybe.
Or fulfilling their creative potential.
Or whatever it is you find meaningful.
Point is this: you need a bigger purpose to move toward than simply “getting out of the pain of being unhappy.”
That’s just an artificially constructed, self-generated ROOM you’ve built for yourself.
Once you get out of the dungeon, you are free to create, to explore, discover, and grow.
You can’t opt out of playing the game of life.
But there are many ways to play.
Choose wisely.
- Linus