#emo #happy #yap

Context Ever ask someone what their goal is? They respond, “Just to be happy”. It happens a lot from my own mouth and many others.

Let’s assume that their response is from a place of being honest and not a lazy response, just for the sake of not being contradictory. I’ve been thinking how it’s a bad response in general and there’s a lot of room to really dig deep into this thought.

So, the other night I was talking with my friend Terrance at 2am - 3am, one of those conversations. Happiness came up in our conversation and something made sense; this is my attempt to let it out.

Happiness is totally a viable reason to want to live. It’s a damn good one. I want to be happy and sure can walk down the street to find someone else with similar aspirations. It’s just not a great response because it’s too broad. Like anything, having broad goals, broad ideas, or broad views are not very useful. It lacks mission, reason, and does not make for a good action plan.

If we want to be happy, it’s important to figure out what our definition of happy is. In my conversation with Terrance, I gave it some thought and came up with this:

“Happiness: The accumulation of positive emotion in one’s daily life,” I said.

accumulation

At first glance this may seem like an extremely redundant claim. Of course, if you have positive emotions you’re going to be happy. But, in life it feels as though that people attach happiness with a large activities and make it seem like a grand prize. Woah, I’m so happy to have gotten a scholarship, I’m so happy to go on this trip, or you should do hobbies to be happy.

Being attributed to large gestures/events seems wrong to me. “accumulating” in my sentence beings attention to the idea of a build up of emotion or in small sizes. I don’t think that happiness has to be grand, it can be just doing the small things that add up to a larger feeling of happiness. It also is probably much more sustainable to have smaller pieces to aim for than having to setup large events or goals to be said happy.

Look at the modern day, I don’t have any studies with me but there’s always such a movement around how everyone is depressed and sad. Why? Most would say or culture to be someone, get money, pressure of matching social standards, but to me it looks like a lack of accumulating positive emotions.

Average path, go school -> study -> give youth for education -> give adulthood for retirement -> death. Than sprinkle in some little happy moments in between like hobbies, family, or entertainment. If you imagine the graph, it’s like small spikes upwards and than large decline of happiness throughout life.

Why not build your life around smaller gestures that can bring happiness. Optimize the tiny tasks that leverage the big emotional gains. For me, a cup of coffee or tea, petting my dog, cleaning up my room, writing/coding, rearranging my desk, or having a conversation with a friend. Sounds pretty generic but here’s another example that may resonate with you.

For me, the day is ruined when I worked all day on something to see nothing come out of it. There is nothing worse to my mental to have sat down on a chair programming to come out with nothing new. Just more lines of code that go to the shadow realm or is realized to have not been helpful at all. I found, writing to be an incredible activity that helps or anything to show progress.

Like people say, you got to set small goals. Hey, remember what I said. We’re reverting back to what we just mentioned. No more grand prizes to spike happiness. What’s happening is setting goals to spike their addiction quicker with less resistance. Only issue, as projects grow in complexity small goals quickly become big problems. Hurts even more when goals that you set that you deem small or unattainable. Pick something different.

Writing/Journaling is great. Every night, I would journal a small part of my day into a book. It’s not forceful or a chore, there is not pressure to write if not feeling it. It can be here in my notes, google docs, or my physical note book if I’m feeling more mysterious lol. After writing, I know my words have either sharpened an idea or left a fun little passage for me to come back to. No stress to produce anything notable.

As time passes, my notes, my thoughts, my ideas quickly accumulate to amass to greater values. From small gestures that improved the day, it quickly grows to be a source of happiness.

note writing may not have been the best example cause it actually is a super activity. It makes me feel good for producing if nothing is done and also allows me to be proud of something I have written. I’ve went offtopic at the end. Just know, fill the day with things you enjoy and it does not have to be big or grand. Live each moment with bringing happiness instead of aiming at unattainable joys. small things go bigggg.

daily

At the end of my definition I added daily. Why? Aside of small things that make you happy. We need to remember to push it everyday. With grand prizes it is usually gate keep for special occasion which is why the spike of happiness is so high. But, accumulating requires daily effort and habits that mold you to be happy. Each day, is the day you can be happy.

Sacarfice culture is such a killer to the daily focus of being happy. Grind is literally the daily unhappiness that is normalized to push ourselves ahead of others. For what? I don’t even know what I want the money for. Don’t get me wrong, money is great. Just do we need to give our entire soul to making the bread. I don’t think so.

balance

Not apart of my definition but the thought came up to be but I think that balance is a bait. Work life balance sounds like the ratio of negative and positive emotions we are willing to tolerate. Balance is such a lame word. When it comes to the goods and the bads. Is it not obvious we just want the good. If I told you that there is 3 oranges 2 good 1 bad and you pick 2, which do you pick? You pick the 2 good ones. Do we really need to have the bad oranges. I guess in life it’s true that you don’t get to pick especially in this market but man, this is lame. Balance more like how much pain you want to tolerate.