This blog is about being happy.
In fact, all blogs are about being happy.
Actually, everything we write, say, do and aspire to is to be happy and to support other people to be happy (I think that is what love is?).
I have some qualms with the goal of happiness as I think it is often depicted in self-help culture:
1) The goal need not be to be happy all of the time, or even happy most of the time. The goal can just to feel 1% happier, 1% more of the time. As per Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (*not true* – but the wording suits me and nobody reads this so f**k it), we will feel good as long as it better than what we have felt before.
2) Emotions that are not happy: angry, sad, in grief, anxious, manic – are not to be avoided at all costs. A highly educational movie released in 2015 should have taught us this much. Just like happiness, these are states of being to be observed and/or experienced as they build, peak and decay.
3) Even if the goal *was* to be happy all the time, there is nothing we, (and certainly not anyone else in our lives – I see you saviors and hyper-positives out there) can do can do to guarantee this.
4) But since there are some concrete things we can do that almost certainly will give us that >1% boost, it makes sense to try to do those things! Go to therapy, move your body in a way that feels good, get some more sunlight, connect with your friends, delete social media, floss your teeth, take the meds that help and drop the ones that don’t etc. … I don’t know you better than you know you, go figure out what things make you happy (and try to do more of that) and what things make you sad (and try to do less of that). Given that you live comfortably, I suspect that the everyday rituals we practice and the relationships we nurture contribute more to our happiness than the conspicuous factors of purposeful work, owning property, earning a high salary etc. Note that included in the list of things that make many people (the author included) sad is criticizing one’s self for not perfectly executing the happy habits and stopping the sad habits – watch out for this one.
x A
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