Ways to make yourself happier
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I had to learn this the hard way. Almost everything I owned was destroyed in a flood a couple of years ago. I watched one of my housemates freak out and cry for days about it. It couldn't have been shoved in my face harder that the choice was mine. I could assume that happiness came from the lifestyle I designed for myself, as my housemate did, and therefore it had just been completely destroyed with no hope of coming back any time soon. Or, I could assume happiness was a state of being that could be achieved at any point in time, no matter what was going on: that there are no prerequisites to happiness.
And suddenly, I was happy.
And then I met my wife. And I got to more work that I loved, rather than needed. And found a modicum of success in my consultancy. And got out of debt. And made a lot of new, wonderful friends. After years of being unhappy and getting nowhere on the goals that I thought would make me happy, I flipped a switch and found out that the goals required happiness out of me.
I try to remember that I live in the absolute best times in history. 200 years ago, even kings couldn't live as well as I do, now. I've got air conditioning. I've got running water that is both hot AND cold. None of my family died from tuberculosis. I can be reasonably sure nobody is going to invade my country and kill my kin. I don't personally know anyone who has ever had dysentery.
And sometimes I just wallow in sadness. It feels good sometimes. Sleep in. Eat a cheeseburger. Eat 3 cheeseburgers. Play a video game. Play a video game for 5 hours. Sometimes things have to get worse before they are big enough to get rid of.
It's a conscious decision, every day. That's part of why I go by "moron4hire". It's a reminder that, despite my ambitions and my progress, I'm a base idiot compared to some other people. I still work and try to do more, but it's because I know that it will help people, not because it will make me happy.
I feel like your story about the flood would have fit right in with the theme of the book.
One story from the book concerns Musonious, a stoic who is exiled from his home, deprived of his country, family and friends and ultimately forced to live on a "worthless", barren island. Even through all this he is still is able to find happiness by changing his state of mind about his circumstances.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-ebook/dp/B0040...
I've never really believed that "you don't own your stuff - your stuff owns you"; I've always thought that was claptrap. But it was interesting to me that in the face of losing all my stuff it didn't really bother me too much.
Sometimes, the universe provides enough randomness to just let you stumble on counterexamples to your theorems.
After the second time, I told myself that the key to being happy was to stop being unhappy - that it was a state of mind. But it didn't work. I had no idea how to just make a choice to be happy, or even to stop being sad. Just recognising that it was true didn't change anything for me - despite having experienced that it was possible. I can make a choice to pick up a pencil but I can't even visualise happiness - it's not an object I can represent in my head as something I can perform operations on in the same sense that numbers are.
I wasn't really happy until I left university and started doing things that I cared about.
One of my friends, who used to do a lot of drugs, wasn't really happy until she got her husband and kid.
I'm not gonna say it's different for everyone, because there are obviously common themes. But I suspect there are some variances in how people are wired up. (For example of another instance of people being wired up differently, some people count audibly in their heads, whereas others visualise numbers - and this is testable by asking groups of people to speak and count a certain period of time out. (See What Do You Care What Other People Think? )) As such, while I'd urge people to try just being happy, if they can, I'd hesitate to tell people that if they think they need something to be happy they're never going to be happy. I've seen people who think they need things to be happy, and after getting those things they seem subsequently to have been happy.
Edit: Affect is a noun. It means "the way you feel", and the inflection is on the first syllable. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/affect#Etymology_3
More info:
http://morehappy.me/2013/07/06/to-boost-happiness-imagine-ho...
The flip side of that coin is that there is no such thing as a magic amount of free time where you will suddenly be able to exercise, meditate, cook your own meals, or whatever you want to do. It can either always be fit in or never be fit in in my experience.
What do you mean?
And then one day I took the plunge, I accidentally woke up early and decided to go to the gym (my family had a membership). I didn't even know what to do, really. I jogged on a treadmill for a bit, jostled around on a few weight machines, did a few dumbbell curls. I felt like a dumbass who didn't belong there. And I was sleepy. It sucked.
But then I woke up an hour and a half early the next morning and I did it again. And again. Every fucking day. It eventually started sucking less and less.
Two weeks later I had streamlined my gym visit (waking up -> changing -> pre-workout drink -> drive to gym -> workout -> home -> shower -> protein -> work) to 65 minutes and change. And I felt (and actually looked) better than I had in years.
Three years later, and my workout is now an immutable part of my day. It's on my calendar, whether I'm working or on vacation. In town or overseas. And nobody fucks with those 65 minutes that I never had time for back in the day.
When I used to go to the gym I remember always sleeping soundly, always waking up feeling awesome and always having a great feeling throughout the day. Can't recommend it enough.
I started last year doing 5 pushups first thing when I got to work in the morning. Now I do 50 pushups every morning.
If your office has treadmill desks, use them! I swear I get more coding done on the treadmill than I do sitting at my desk. (it could also be the fact that fewer people bother me on the treadmill.)
Then I got a weight set where I could progressively add weight every week. And ate more and had appetite. That finally made a difference in fitness level and mood.
Progressing to complex bodyweight exercises is trickier. Lifting weights properly is technical enough, planche, even headstand pushups weren't going to happen for me. I made every form mistake you can make with weights. Mistakes with complex bodyweight moves halt progress.
This is just a huge waste of money. And also often enough poorly done [2].
[1] http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JYj4KStQjhIC&oi=f... [2] http://www.edvul.com/pdf/VulHarrisWinkielmanPashler-PPS-2009... [3] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465018777/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
What we call 'happiness' or 'sadness' is just some combination of the thousands of automatic judgements we've made about the world recently. All of these judgments (choices) are themselves composed of smaller judgements (this is good, this is bad). We try not to be 'judgemental', and I know what people mean when they say that, but I'd say it is in fact probably all we can do. I mean, technically speaking.
You can zoom in to examine the tiny choices (to some extent), and you can zoom out so that sometimes happiness looks for all the world like a single big ol' choice. I think this is what people call 'clarity', and I think I've experienced it once or twice.
But actually, for most of us, most of the time, happiness is the result of all these tiny, composable, semi-automatic judgements about the world, and we have to keep on making these choices, over and over and over again as we think. And exercising, meditating, getting enough sleep, spending quality time with other humans, etc. - this stuff really will help us improve our semi-automatic judgements so that we are saying "this is good...this is good..." slightly more often than before.
[slight edits for clarity]
You can exercise, meditate, walk to work, have 100 close friends and family you keep in contact with regularly, and take every other step happiness gurus preach, but if you aren't actively working towards goals that increase your life satisfaction, you're in trouble.
The hard part is figuring out what you need to do to feel satisfied at the end of the day.
First of all, recent research has indicated that shallow happiness is not as important for well-being as a sense of purpose (http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/meaning-is...).
Second, if you spend time helping others only so far as it enriches your life, that is literally the definition of selfishness. This is NOT a philosophy that should be encouraged or applauded.
Productivity is not an end, it is a means to accomplish something. If you are the world's most efficient and productive marble bathtub designer, and you only help others to the extent that it makes you happier, you are a jerk.
Everyone does selfish things, some of those things make people happier. The author doesn't say to help people to be not selfish, the author says to help people to feel better about yourself.
>"This is NOT an approach to life that should be encouraged or applauded."
Any reason why not?
>"If you are the world's most efficient and productive marble bathtub designer, and you only help others to the extent that it makes you happier, you are a jerk."
What if you are the world's most productive and efficient designer of water systems to help save people in third world countries, and you only do it to the extend it makes you happier, are you still a jerk?
I like the way you pass judgement on people and at the same time try to get people to not help others because you view it as selfish.
[added] scarcrowbob (below) has such a good comment it is quotable.
Yeah, his post is so asinine it makes my head hurt.
At the end of the day, there is a selfish component to everything. There is no such thing as pure altruism: even acts that seem purely altruistic are performed ultimately because they make the person feel good.
The important thing is that this does not make the person a jerk. I mean, is Bill Gates a jerk? No, right? Helping other people makes him happier, and gives him satisfaction with the feeling of giving back to the world, but if we act like rational people and evaluate his actions on the effect they have on others, then he's definitely an awesome person.
I like to combine moral relativism with the person's intent, both internal (what they hope to accomplish for themselves) and their external intent (what they hope to accomplish for others) with the impact of their actions.
Any single approach will likely cause massive errors in analysis. That is typical of all analysis, not just philosophy.
I'm sure we'd all be better people if instead of helping others, we spent time judging and bashing those who spend time helping others but don't have the proper frame of mind when doing so.
Then we could get into the whole philosophy 101 debate of "Does truly selfless behavior exist?"
You don't see something wrong with this? Maybe we as a society are messed up because we consider a one hour commute (one way) to be "normal". Maybe we need to start reconsidering the value of living closer to where we work, or the fact that you can't get "Quality of life, better schools, proximity to outdoor activities, etc" close to where we work. Maybe if wages were more competitive, or housing costs weren't inflated, we could afford to live closer to where we work.
The interesting thing that the research uncovered is that people are strongly biased to underestimate the effect of commute time relative to other factors. For example, their survey found that people with effectively no commute were about as happy as people with a one-hour commute who made 40% more.
So, yeah, the article is wrong to say that things like a bigger house or better job "just don't work". But they almost certainly won't work as well as people expect them to.
"happiness is a choice," insists able-bodied, healthy, beautiful millionaire jennifer aniston in the new edition of some shit magazine
Seems like a very authoritative source.