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How To Be Happy: A Scientific Perspective
Do you sometimes struggle to be happy despite knowing that you live a good life?
I get it, we all chase happiness because it makes a difference in the quality of our lives. I’m no different.
But I also believe we should be careful that we don’t mix up happiness and pleasure. Otherwise, you end up on the Hedonic Treadmill: A state of continually chasing pleasure to elevate your happiness levels.
But the problem is that pleasure only gives us a temporary boost in happiness. Drinking alcohol, smoking nicotine, having sex, buying the latest iPhone—it gives us pleasure. But we always go back to our set level of happiness.
The usefulness of suffering
Most of our suffering is useless.
Eckhart Tolle wrote a line in Stillness Speaks that I often think of:
“Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.”
He is of course referring to the mental suffering that so many of us go through every day. The constant mental chatter that takes away our attention from the present to the voice that’s never satisfied.
Working hard won’t make you rich
Working hard won’t make you rich.
I know that’s not what we’ve grown up hearing. We’ve heard the opposite.
- Put in the hours.
- Outwork everyone.
- Grind now, get paid later.
- Do that long enough and the money shows up.
It doesn’t work that way, though… At least not the way we’ve been promised.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Even if you work hard and you don’t get rich, the work gives you something else.
Something most people overlook because they’re too busy waiting for the paycheck. And it’s worth more than the money.
I was obsessed with money… then I found philosophy
Last week I was walking through town with my wife and our son in the stroller. We ran into a former high school classmate. We were both pleasantly surprised to see each other after so many years.
He looked at my wife and said: “He was always the cool guy in school.”
I laughed because it reminded me how much I cared about how I looked and what people thought of me back then.
For a sixteen-year-old, that’s probably normal. But at some point, you’ve got to stop living like that.
The thing is, most people don’t actually stop. They just trade one obsession for another.