Life

Happiness

We all want to be happy. If you have the survival thing down, which as a reader of this site, I believe you do, then the next thing to focus on is happiness. It is natural. If you want success, or money, or a "good job", or a husband or wife, it is probably something you think will lead to happiness. If you believe your life is for a purpose that precludes happiness, then you are probably just using it as an excuse to justify not being happy.

So if you are comfortable with pursuing this ideal, then please enjoy this perfectly flawless, fail-safe guide to eternal bliss. On what authority do I preach? Will reading this help you? Just as you would not ask a median income citizen how to get rich, you would not ask a content man, or even a moderately happy man, how to be happy. You would want to ask someone at the peak of sublimity, the jolliest person you could find. A man who is exceptionally overjoyed. If you find this man, tell me and I will link to his site.

In the meantime, I am happier than you, and that is what counts. OK, perhaps not, but what are you going to do? Are you going to argue right now? With a piece of writing? If so, you have bigger problems than your disposition.

I cannot promise happiness, and I do not think anyone is happy all the time, but I do think you can feel happy most of the time if you try. This is simply a collection of ideas that help me stay positive. Like all suggestions, they are best taken with a grain of psychotropic mood enhancing substances.

Mind, Body, Soul

To gain a foothold on happiness there are three aspects of your being that require consistent nourishment. If you leave one of the legs of this tripod to decay, it will collapse.

No matter your genetic predisposition, educational background, or current basis of knowledge, there is always more you can learn. Your mind will atrophy from disuse, just like your muscles. It is good to add to your knowledge with things like history or culture but also to important exercise your mind by studying something interactive like language, math, or music.

Would you like to learn something new? Try Wikipedia.

You will feel better if you eat well and treat your body right. Again this is quite obvious. Many think effort will make them less happy but if your body feels good, so will you. Besides improving health, workouts like running or swimming also lead to endorphin production which will produce a high, a great way to kill a bad mood.

To go for a run, all you need is shoes. To do push-ups or sit-ups all you need is a floor. Unless you are an astronaut (I welcome our extra-terrestrial readers) and do not have the luxury of gravity, there is nothing stopping you from exercising but yourself.

This aspect of your existence is the most difficult to define and control. I think it amounts to keeping your life in a supportive frame of reference. To nourish your soul you need a higher purpose. "Higher" does not necessarily mean leaving an indelible mark on humanity, or even helping humanity, but it does mean being something other than a cog in the machine. Some people get this through religion but you do not need to be religious to appreciate life as something more than survival.

It is important to have good friends and the best way to have a good friend is to be one. The single greatest obstacle I see towards people getting along is perceiving malice where none is due. If the behaviour of someone offends you, and there are multiple explanations, then the explanation where the person was deliberately trying to mess with you is the worst one. A variant of Occam's Razor, I call this principle "Metcalfe's Butter Knife".

Unlike developing your mind or body, developing your soul is prone to greater obstacles. How you can feed your soul may depend on what is available to you at any given period and what you need to do may be unclear. If you have no idea where to start, start with social interaction and have fun. You only live once, so if you like to dance, dance. If you like to play computer games, play computer games.

Spheres of influence and concern

One of the quickest ways to trigger depression is by getting the feeling that the circumstances of your life are beyond your control. This can happen on a macroscopic scale such as being trapped in an ill-fitting role at work, or on a smaller scale such as losing your metro pass or having a date cancel on you.

If you feel that the things you desire to happen are not happening, you will feel bad. The immediate frustrations of an unfavourable outcome are consciously obvious. The resulting depression, however, can appear without apparent relation to the events.

This kind of depression is a result of dissonance between your sphere of influence and your sphere of concern. To be happy, you must contain your sphere of concern within your sphere of influence. There are two ways of doing this.

Shrink Concern
One way, the Buddhist way, is to shrink your sphere of concern. By allowing yourself to accept events as they unfold, you can achieve a powerful state of emotional stability. This is physically easier than the alternate method of increasing your sphere of influence because it is strictly a mental exercise. Nothing and no one can stop you from reducing what you worry about. Practically speaking, it has limits. Many social forces and years of indoctrination wire your brain to be concerned about all kinds of things.

Grow Influence
The other way to bring your sphere of concern within your sphere of influence is to increase your sphere of influence. This will require physical effort. More money, more knowledge, more friends, more important friends, discipline. These are all things that can increase your sphere of influence. You may have noticed they will also increase your sphere of concern. That is why it is important you never neglect the simpler way of creating harmony between the two spheres.

Different strokes

We are all different. There are varying degrees of overlap between different personalities, but except for identical twins, our psychological profiles are diverse. Some things that are very effective for some people work against others.

It can be extremely frustrating trying to fit into a model of life prescribed for you but designed for someone else. Perhaps some of the things you are striving for, like money, order, or spontaneity, are goals that you see as desirable simply because you perceive them as important. Maybe you associate happy people you know with one of the traits. Maybe a book or television show or advertising campaign has convinced you, perhaps subconsciously, to aim for something you do not need.

Take a step back and decide what is important to you. Your real friends will not leave you if you stop wearing designer sneakers.

Do unto others

Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. This is such a simple rule to follow and so popular it crosses virtually all cultural and religious boundaries. The cynics should know, doing a good deed for someone else will boost your happiness.¹ So please, everyone, help each other out.

Simplicity

Why is this outlook so simplistic? Life is simplistic. Whether you believe in God or Allah, existentialism or pragmatism, conscious will or determinism, your daily actions are based on social interaction and human instinct. In fact, much of the decisions we make are processed subconsciously.²

The main idea is to work on what you can without getting bogged down in analysis, philosophy, and doubt. Simplicity is also a good way to reduce your sphere of concern. So if you want to be happy, try these ideas out and, if they don't fit, don't wear them.

Notes

Unless paid or requested, I am usually too temporally challenged (lazy) to include references. The first reference was because I felt you might not actually believe what I said. The second reference is to keep the first one company.

[1] Lyubomirsky, S., King, L. A., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 803-855.

[2] Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005.