I am happiest when I cease to identify with myself. When I am actively engaged in a project (or entertainment) and find myself grinning and humming with no thought of "I," it is when I recharge and discover the world as positive.
The paradox is to consider who you are making happy: if the "I" goes missing when you experience joy, what is doing the enjoying? Perhaps the "me" beneath the ego.
Tag: happiness
- Theme: Self
The joy of losing yourself
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Self
Your attention is your state
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1–2 minutesWhere your attention goes is your state of being.
Depression, anger, and resentment are good at drawing and maintaining attention, so we identify with that state.
Unfortunately, humans are not very good at predicting what will make us happy (what will draw our attention) long-term: we tend to normalize positivity quickly, crashing back into negative wool-gathering.For example, a new car or pay raise makes us happy only for a short time, but these are major life-altering positives we predicted would bring us contentment or joy.
To be happy, we must balance pleasure and purpose, but we tend to gravitate towards pleasure without considering extended fulfillment by focusing on our life goals.
– ideas from Paul Dolan
- Theme: Culture
Play cures Burnout
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1–2 minutesCreativity generates positive energy.
You will be tempted to be creatively productive, to make something with utility, but don’t succumb to that instinct: Make something pointless that makes you laugh.
Play is the ultimate cure for burnout. - Theme: Self
Going backwards to find joy
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1–2 minutesPlease return to something you were once good at and rediscover joy.
The world can taint and warp our desires, turning spontaneous happiness into capitalized products and behaviors. Going back to that one thing from childhood can cut through the enveloping layers of despair, cynicism, and falsity to recover the glow inside. - Theme: Self
The Fight Only Lasts a Minute
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1–2 minutesConfrontation is a fight. A fight only lasts a minute, but how you feel (scared or content) can last your whole life.
You can avoid the minute for decades, letting it haunt and shape you, or spend one minute to know you took action to save the rest of your life.
~ Teddy Atlas - Theme: Self
Feeling the good life
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1–2 minutesThere is a difference between knowing life could be better and feeling you have lived better.
Recalling a moment of joy, peace, and contentment so profound it haunts you can vibrantly displace the folly of knowing and redirect our striving. - Theme: Self
We do not Overcome without Nurturing
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1–2 minutesYou must nurture your positive drives, allowing them to become strong enough to overcome the negative impulses and habits.
It is not enough to decide; you must develop the inner fortitude to perform the outward action.
(This supposes we live inward-to-outward instead of external-to-internal.)
- Theme: Self
The pleasure principle’s principle failure.
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1–2 minutesHedonism is the pursuit of pleasure: your pleasure.
Over-indexed on hedonism converts altruism into a self-serving glow: loving your child is for your own benefit, not theirs.
This discounts all the other motivations by collapsing them into one principle (selfish motivation), which requires mental two-stepping to validate your impulse to care.
(As humans, we are a multiplicity of drives and perspectives, many of which are social bonds, ideological impulses, and non-rational responsibility to others… which need not be reduced into a singular perspective.)
- Theme: Self
Distracted from enduring values by pleasure
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1–2 minutesWhen the impulse to purchase or sink into emotional distraction arise, attempt to pause.
The hedonic treadmill of pursuing pleasure means you must always be running faster, because pleasure and desire always requires more. Turning from pleasure, is there a more enduring (less transitory and consuming) goal you may pursue? - Theme: Growth
Moving the needle
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1–2 minutesThe action that moves the needle (really makes you productive and moves you forward in life) is seldom the thing you enjoy doing.
Yet, by undertaking it, you can ensure deeper fulfillment and joy later.