So to be happy is to be at peace with where you are in life right now.Īnd at the root of desire is attachment. You desire something else in your life, you are unsatisfied with your current situation. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things.Īt the root of all unhappiness is desire. Happiness is not about positive thoughts. At the end of this discussion, we came to a definition that really resonates with me. A lot of the behaviors described above leave the person feeling worse, even somewhat depressed, after they stop engaging. 📝To be happy is more than to just feel pleasure in the moment. Instant gratification isn’t really happiness.

😶Seeking pleasure it not necessarily bad - it’s when we do considering only the short term effects, forgoing the long term effects, that it becomes a problem. Hedonistic people are pursuing pleasure, so they may engage in things such as drinking, overeating, or avoiding exercise. An extrapolation of this may be hedonism - optimizing for pleasure and minimizing suffering in your life. I’m sure you’ve heard about instant gratification- doing what is easiest and most rewarding in the moment. So should you stop doing those things?Īvoiding things that are in the moment unpleasant has unfortunately become more and more common. A lot of things that make you happy require you to be unhappy first. You become healthier, and you are flooded with endorphins. But the interesting thing here is that after you exercise, it makes you happier. 💪Most people don’t enjoy the feeling of physical pain. Well, there’s a lot of stuff you wouldn’t do if you were only optimizing for happiness. But let’s circle back to the original question: should happiness be our ultimate goal in life? So now we’ve somewhat defined what it means to be happy. Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. An A+ student who gets an 80 on a test might be severely disappointed, meanwhile a student with an average of 70 might be absolutely ecstatic with the same result. So that begs the question, can we be happy from inside, not being dependent on external events? 🫂If you think about it this way - events mean nothing until we assign meaning to them. A lot of our happiness is from external events: “when I get this job I’ll be happy,” “I just got a wonderful gift from my aunt which made me happy,” “I’m so happy - x just happened!” Then we asked what creates happiness, and how do we define it? Well first of all, definitions vary from person to person. But if you view happiness as a end result, it may be harder to achieve. So applying the same thinking to happiness, if you view happiness as a habit, you can be fulfilled in that manner. Or you could fall into the trap of perfection, and become so invested in making it perfect you are essentially paralyzed and don’t ever start. 📉Įven if you simply wanted to create something that you yourself deemed a “masterpiece,” how would you define that? Then you can easily fall into the trap of always wanting more, so this is going to take forever to achieve, so chances are you won’t feel like you achieved it. You can work forever and ever, but you won’t be fulfilled until someone else calls your work a masterpiece. Now other people are deciding whether you achieve your goal or not. How do you define masterpiece? Let’s say you choose to define it as “being admired by many people.” You just outsourced your fulfillment to other people. 🙂īut let’s say you choose to focus on results. Fulfilling your goal will make you happy.

Whether you paint every day or not is up to you, your discipline and commitment. Fulfilling your goal is now within your control. If you decide to focus on the process of becoming a painter, say you choose to paint everyday.

Scientific butterfly sketch