what is happiness to you? - Page 5

On September 10 2012 14:47 Kich wrote:
Happiness is pretty fucking simple. There was a time in high school where I was really mopey about shit all the time and then I was like, "This isn't worth it, I'm just going to be happy about shit and do things that make me happy."

It's been like, I dunno, 8 or 9 years now and I've been almost universally happy about everything. Happiness is a choice. Find shit that makes you happy and just be like "This is how I need to feel about everything." You know what it was for me? Putting on new socks. I was like "This feeling is how I should feel about doing anything." So I did. And after that it was being good at Counter-strike, and then it was being good at WoW, and then it was being good at Magic, and then it was being good at my major in college, and then it was being good at looking good, and then it was just the general understanding that I'm kind of an awesome dude and I should be ok in life. And now I'm ok in life because I have a lot of self esteem because I made myself have a lot of self esteem.

Relevant video:
http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html

The relevant concept of the video is that happiness is mostly created within. By knowing everything about you as a person it's only possible to predict 10% of your longterm happiness, 90% of it is created from within, it's how you perceive reality. And that's pretty much it at it's core. Don't look for happiness, experience it. If happiness is something you are trying to achieve you're actively doing it wrong. Happiness is a state of mind. You can literally train yourself to be happy and that video goes over a lot of good ways of doing it. For example: write down 3 different things you're grateful for every day without repeating them for 21 days, over the course of time your mind starts actively searching for positive things rather than negative things. It gets harder to dig deep and find something completely new to be happy about as the time goes on but there's always something.

Another book that really helped me achieve happiness was The Paradox of Choice. I read this book in my junior year of college and it literally changed my life. I've lived by it's ideas ever since and I've come to a point where decision making for me is near instantaneous and I've never been disappointed about a decision I've made for the past 3 years. To put it very simply, the book explains that a lot of human anxiety and depression can be linked to the sheer number of choices that we have when making decisions. When you want to buy a new watch, you have online stores, local malls, thousands of different watches you can buy. The fact that you can return it if you don't like it makes it even worse, it makes decisions meaningless and stressful. Some people might spend all day browsing only to find three or four different watches that they couldn't decide between.

Think about how often that kind of shit happens to you. Any decision in which you have 2 or more choices and you have trouble making that decision. You buy one, but then you know what immediately happens to most people? They start thinking about the things they liked about the other ones and constantly question the choice they made. This causes a ton of stress. You don't want that.

This has gone kind of long, but here's my advice to legit teaching yourself to be happy:

Step 1: Spend an enormous amount of your time self-analyzing yourself specifically about things that make you happy. If you like a band, really sit down and evaluate exactly what about their music makes you like them. Is it certain riffs or tones or lyrics they use? If you like a color, what it is about that color, where else do you see it? I mean like, dig fucking deep about absurdly minor things. What kind of cups do you like drinking out of, what kind of textures do you like feeling with your hands, what shape of shoes do you like, what breakfast foods do you like, what smells do you like, really examine everything about everything. I ask people around me about stuff like this a lot and I literally lost count of how many people have told me that they only have these kinds of conversations with me. A lot of people (most) don't think about what makes them happy or why it even does. But when you can accurately assess what about certain things makes you happy you've opened up a path. You can definitively say "I really like this because of this." It doesn't even have to be logical, I don't really like pancakes that much because they're too bready--the fuck does that even mean? I know what it means but it's still a sort of undefined term.

I should make it clear that step 1 took me about a year, maybe a year and a half.

Step 2: Through analyzing what makes you happy you'll find that you realize you don't like a lot of things for no particular reason other than you don't. Which is fine. This is where you should learn to make better choices IE: Read "The Paradox of Choice" and follow that shit to the core. Guess how long it took me to buy my watch that I get constant praise and recognition for? No more than 12 seconds. Walked up to counter, said I wanted a square face with no numbers on it, was presented with like 12 in the case. First one I looked at, bought it. Not every choice is a snap decision, but honest to god most choices just don't fucking matter enough to worry about them. It's a goddamn watch. Learning to make smaller decisions better translates well into making harder bigger decisions easier. It often comes down to simply asking yourself "which one would make me happier"? Which you know what? You'll know after step 1.

Step 3: Step 3 happens sort of simultaneously through steps 1 and 2 but it's positive psychology at it's core. Just be ok with who you are and what you like doing and stop having so much nerd shame and shit. Be ok with what you look like, be ok with what you like, be ok with the decisions you make, and be ok with you who are.

I would highly recommend reading The Men's Fashion Thread here on team liquid. Learn to look good. It sounds stupid but you do feel better about yourself when you spend time to make yourself look good. And as an added bonus and plug, I'm quoted on their front post about what it actually means to appreciate fashion and how you look: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=306479

It's exactly why I dress well. I spend money on that shit. People noticing makes me feel better and there's actually nothing wrong with it, you know why? Because I notice too. I get up, I get dressed, and I'm like "Fuckin a I look good." and it's stupid shit like that that reinforces that I'm happy about myself.

I taught myself to be happy, I taught myself to make decisions that make me happy, I taught myself to be happy with who I am, and I go out of my way to try and teach others the same thing. Happiness in it's entirety is about how you perceive your own reality.