The scariest thing in being happy is how much of our everyday lives turn into meaningless pile of deprecated trade-offs.
Things that you thought meant something for you actually don't. Things that you thought you'd keep for life actually turn out to be nonimportant. People you considered close were just vehicles for you: you gave them that love you didn't know how to give to yourself. And finally, things that you so cunningly shielded from your gaze for years begin to pop up and become unavoidable challenges.
That is because you can only be happy when you do things for the right reasons. Otherwise you just think you're happy and yet you spend your time trying to fill in gaps in yourself and your life, gaps that you don't know how to love. In other words, you're sitting on the passenger's seat yourself and letting what you think other people will think of you drive your life.
Go stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself if you're happy. Are you so happy that you wouldn't want to change anything in your life? Are you so happy that while you might certainly want to change some things you would still be perfectly content should those things actually never change? Ask yourself if there's some part of yourself that you don't love one hundred percent? Not 99, but 100? Ask yourself if you see too much fat, a body too skinny, or a person too unpopular and rejected, or someone who can't steer away from too many bad habits? Or do you see a person with weaknesses yet completely accept him/her just the way s/he is?
I'm not entirely happy myself but there have been, and there are, occasional moments when I am 100% happy.
It's those moments when I wouldn't replace a single bit of myself, whether it's hemorrhoids, feelings of guilt, or the history of how I've lived.
I am not trying to troll you; I mean this question honestly: Why do you care so much about being happy? I know that is the default goal of most people, but it seems rather like chasing gold at the end of the rainbow when you have no reason to think that the gold exists. Do you know of anyone anywhere ever who has spent the majority of their time 100% or even 80% happy? Was this person a holder of a medical marijuana card?
I think we would look down on someone who spent their life stoned. I do not see why this method of achieving the "happy" feeling as any less admirable than any other method. In the end, you are just striving to be chemically stoned, though one method uses outside chemicals to achieve this feeling and the other uses activities and experiences of a non-chemical nature. In the end you are just striving to put and to keep your brain in some chemical state. Does not seem like much to me.
Christopher Hitchens -- who has been on my mind much as the first anniversary of his death is in nine days -- once said that if offered a stress-free and blissful life, he would not want it, that he likes the feeling of burning the candle at both ends and the stress of things. Do not make the mistake of saying that he has redefined happiness for himself to mean the state of stress, because that is not what we are talking about when people talk about wanting to "be happy". They mean they want to feel good and joyous. Hitchens did not say that being stressed and attenuated through effort gave him joy, he only said that he preferred this state to anything else. I sympathize with him on this point and take it from me, this is not the same as the "happiness" that most people are talking about. It is more like a state of satisfaction with occasional blimps of good humor mixed in with a great deal of unpleasant emotions. But, stiff upper lip and all that.
I think anyone who imagines that if they start a startup and strike it rich that, like a Sim, all their need meters will max out at green and they will feel permanently joyous is completely kidding themselves. This just is not how life goes. Life does not plateau at joy. It is a constant moving wave.
I do admit that happiness is an ambiguous word: for some people it's about merely feeling good and for some people happiness is just a side-effect from the realization that what you have now is all you can actually claim to have—the past and the future don't count. The conversation started from happiness so I sort of bridged over with that word.
I care about living my own life, not somebody else's, and making choices in life for reasons I'm aware of instead of for reasons I don't. At least for me, happiness comes mostly about facing the facts of your life and accepting them.
Being stoned isn't happiness, it's disconnectedness. Living a happy life isn't about that it always feels good but about that it does good. But in the long term that, too, actually gives a good feeling as well.
Things that you thought meant something for you actually don't. Things that you thought you'd keep for life actually turn out to be nonimportant. People you considered close were just vehicles for you: you gave them that love you didn't know how to give to yourself. And finally, things that you so cunningly shielded from your gaze for years begin to pop up and become unavoidable challenges.
That is because you can only be happy when you do things for the right reasons. Otherwise you just think you're happy and yet you spend your time trying to fill in gaps in yourself and your life, gaps that you don't know how to love. In other words, you're sitting on the passenger's seat yourself and letting what you think other people will think of you drive your life.
Go stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself if you're happy. Are you so happy that you wouldn't want to change anything in your life? Are you so happy that while you might certainly want to change some things you would still be perfectly content should those things actually never change? Ask yourself if there's some part of yourself that you don't love one hundred percent? Not 99, but 100? Ask yourself if you see too much fat, a body too skinny, or a person too unpopular and rejected, or someone who can't steer away from too many bad habits? Or do you see a person with weaknesses yet completely accept him/her just the way s/he is?
I'm not entirely happy myself but there have been, and there are, occasional moments when I am 100% happy.
It's those moments when I wouldn't replace a single bit of myself, whether it's hemorrhoids, feelings of guilt, or the history of how I've lived.