How to be happy

I’ve always had a natural aversion to any self-help, new agey spiritual advice. Unfortunately, I realized that I wasn’t exactly the happiest person either. 

I figured I was too clever to learn fluffy things about “being happy”. This presented an obvious problem.

But eventually, I randomly stumbled unto the science of happiness, along with other philosophical concepts derived from Stoicism and Buddhism. I never took any of the supernatural bits seriously, but there were things along the way that I’ve learned. 

Firstly, it was that being happy matters. In fact, it’s the only thing that matters.

It might sound obvious to some, but many people reject this idea. If you gave them a choice between being rich or being happy, many people would choose to be rich. If you were to dig down deep enough and ask, what’s the point of getting status, getting rich, chasing something pleasurable, or building a life that matters, how would you react? None of these sub-goals matter if you’re eventually unhappy at the end. We end up conflating status and pleasure with happiness, which should be the ultimate goal. We aren’t designed to realize this, and we fool ourselves with the proximate rewards of pleasure while thinking that happiness isn’t important.

Sad truth #1: Evolution does not build happy creatures. It builds creatures that desire things.

As living organisms, we strive and desire things because it was necessary for us to survive. Always be hungry to collect more food, gain power in the hierarchy to secure more resources, try to look good to get mating opportunities. Evolution equipped us with deep-seated motivations that cause us to constantly want things, providing an emotional mirage that we will be happy at the end. But there is no evolutionary benefit for an organism to actually be happy, so it does not care if we are or not. All that matters is that we pass down our own genes successfully. As Yuval Harari put it, a squirrel that found its first acorn and subsequently experienced eternal bliss would not survive the next winter.

Evolution made sure that we never feel satisfied because our lives depended on it. We cannot trust biology to lead us to a state of happiness; nature simply does not care about our contentment.

Sad truth #2: Pleasure is not the same as happiness. There are biological and psychological ceilings to pleasure.

Feeling good is not the same as being happy. Any activity you do that gives you a rush of dopamine is always a fleeting pleasure. When you finally get that pleasurable state or positive moment, you dread the inevitable end. You obsess and chase the next hit, which eventually becomes a source of misery in itself. You never feel truly satisfied, because the moment of pleasure you get is always fleeting, and you enter a hedonic treadmill chasing one pleasurable moment after the other. The chase becomes perpetual suffering. 

Worst still, there’s a biological ceiling to how much dopamine your body can produce. There are only so many units of dopamine your brain can produce at each time, so there’s a physiological limit to how much pleasure you can experience.

We are also constrained by psychological expectations. If you get a pay raise, you might feel happier initially, but you quickly adapt your expectations and return to your baseline state a few months after. If you are reading this on an iPhone right now, you are comparatively richer than a vast majority of the human population. You just don’t feel it. No matter how much wealth you acquire, you will always compare upwards, and the relative deprivation will always make you feel like you don’t have enough. 

Sad truth #3: We’re conditioned to play multiplayer games. Happiness is a single-player game.

From the moment we were born, all our actions were geared towards getting the attention and recognition of others. Toddlers quickly pick up behaviors to get adults’ attention and praise. Teenagers take risks and obsess over appearances to get recognition from their peers. We want to look good to get a romantic partner and earn money to gain status in society. We are socially conditioned from birth to understand that our actions only matter if others care about it. Our entire worldview is shaped as a competitive multiplayer game. If no one knows about it, we consider it useless. 

At the end of the day, everything that matters is your own subjective, inner experience. Your level of happiness is a single-player game. Unfortunately, we’re horrible at playing this single-player game. Scoring points internally by pursuing happiness don’t reflect in the outside world, so we never prioritize it. The reality is that all you have in life is a single-player game because only you get to experience it. Most of us can’t even sit in a room alone with our thoughts for 30 minutes. It sounds like an unbearable eternity. We are conditioned to score points in this multiplayer game, but we’re clueless on how to win the actual game that matters. 

Assuming you’ve met your baseline needs of food and shelter, no one else can affect your internal state. Happiness is a state that is ultimately determined by you and nothing else.

On the road to happiness

If there’s one rule, it’s that there are many paths to happiness and that everyone experiences it in their own unique way. There is no one size fits all, but these principles have worked well for me in general. As an additional caveat, clinical depression is also real and probably has a deeper biological basis. I’m not trivializing it by suggesting that it’s possible to just reframe your thinking out of a severe depression through sheer will. But for an average person that’s plagued with maladaptive and negative thoughts, it’s possible to make concrete positive steps to get there.

Real truth #1: Happiness is a choice

This is the first realization that needs to take place before anything else. 

If you secretly enjoy indulging yourself in sad thoughts because it’s more comfortable than facing reality, then happiness will always elude you. 

You must first make the stoic realization that happiness is truly a single-player game that is completely within your control. No matter what your external circumstances, you always have a choice to find inner peace. Treat happiness as a muscle. It’s something that requires active training and can be positively conditioned over time. 

Real truth #2: Happiness is the default state when there are no desires.

We constantly crave and desire things. When we finally get what we desire, we crave even more. This results in a neverending web of desires that entraps us. This follows along Buddhist traditions of thinking, but a key step is to realize that sources of pain and pleasure are always fleeting. Desire is suffering, and the only way to avoid suffering is to escape unlimited desires that will never be satisfied. Realize that most desires, once achieved, only bring temporary pleasure, with the moment dissolving as quickly as it arises.

Happiness is the moment in-between these experiences. The moment when you don’t feel explicit desire, pain, or pleasure, but peace with where you are right now. 

As Naval puts it, desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. 

Real truth #3: You achieve this state by living in the present moment

Current research suggests we spend almost 80% of our time looping through thoughts unconsciously.

There’s a constant flow of thoughts playing in our heads. Most of it consists of living in the past by ruminating on old memories about what we should’ve done, or living in the future by anticipating what will make us happy or miserable.

Living in the future leads to anxiety; living in the past leads to depression. The aim is to remove yourself from these states and exist in the present moment as much as possible. 

Try to move your brain out of your endlessly chattering “monkey mind”, the state described in neuroscience as the default mode network. Learn to embrace boredom and being aware of your own thoughts. Try meditation. If it seems hard, read my post on habits. Sit down for 5 minutes and stare into the openness without having your mind drift or picking up your phone. Go for a walk without listening to music for once and actually feel the wind and observe the trees.
 
Seneca was right, we suffer more in our imagination than in reality. 

Whether you realize it or not, there’s a constant chatter in your brain. It’s usually full of negative, anxiety-ridden thoughts. Be present and experience the present moment for the first time. All you ever have is the current moment. 

Real truth #4: Happiness is not about having positive experiences.

Embracing a negative experience is in itself a positive one. Chasing positive experiences is a negative one. 

This is the key message I took from the book, the subtle art of not giving a f*ck that happens to be loosely based on Stoicism - being present and accepting the experience for what it is. This means embracing the moment, positive or negative, without judging it continuously. It’s natural for us to conflate a pleasurable moment with happiness and a difficult one with misery. If you look at someone running a marathon, that person is probably feeling some level of suffering at the present moment, but I wouldn’t say that he/she isn’t feeling happy. In fact, that negative experience is probably more profound and satisfying. On the flip side, most pleasurable or positive experiences come with its own seed of destruction. We dread the end of it and crave the next positive moment. Embracing negative moments as it is becomes a positive experience in itself. 

Real truth #5: Be grateful 

This is the main cure to escaping the sad truth of escalating expectations. Once we achieve a level of success or comfort, we immediately crave more. The only way to truly avoid the despair of relative deprivation is realizing that you are already fortunate. If you have a functioning body, a capable brain, and some good relationships with family and friends, you should count yourself lucky. 

Having more money is great, but having money will only ever solve money problems. The things that truly matter in life, having a healthy body, a calm mind, and a life with meaningful relationships, cannot be bought. They require exercise and diet, mindfulness, and investment in other people. Wealth can provide you more freedom to pursue these things, but you can’t buy them. 

Start by reminding yourself of things you’re grateful for every single day and invest in areas of your life that give real meaning. 

Ending thoughts

I’m definitely not some zen master that has escaped worldly pleasures, found inner peace, and perfected true happiness. I’m far from it. It still remains a constant struggle for me, so writing this was more of an affirmation as to what I should aim for. 

**Here’s a quick recap:
**We were not evolved to be happy, we were designed to survive by chasing endless desires. We place our minds in the future because we anticipate our actions will lead to eventual happiness, but it usually doesn’t pan out that way.

Recognize happiness is a choice. We start getting there by letting go of desires, accepting external circumstances as they are, appreciating the present moment as it is, and being grateful for what we have now.