Stop trying to be happy

The dogs are barking. The kids are crying. The building next door is so loud that it feels they are nailing your door. The internet just got down. Shit. You grab a gun and shoot the dogs, the kids, the construction workers, you get inside your internet provider company building, open your jacket and shout ' Allahu akbar '. (Please don't do any of listed above)

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When you are raging pissed you are not self-conscious about the state of your anger. You are not thinking clearly, you are not asking yourself " I'm finally angry?", "I'm doing this right?" No, you are out for blood. You are the anger. You live and inhabit the anger. And then... it's gone.

"Happiness is an emotion just like anger, and it's not something that you obtain, it's something you just inhabit."

Just as a confident person doesn't wonder if they are confident, a happy person doesn't wonder if they are happy. They simply are.

This implies that finding happiness is not achieved in itself, but it's the side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experience. And the problem with 'finding happiness' is due to how much 'happiness' is marketed nowadays as a goal. Buy this and be happy. Learn this and be happy. Do this and be happy. But the truth is, you can't buy happiness and you can't achieve happiness. It just is. And it is when you get the other parts of your life in order.

Happiness is not the same as pleasure.

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When we ask someone what makes them happy or what will make them happy, most will say things like : good food, more sex, more money, more parties, more time for Netflix (God bless Netflix), and so on, and those things are pleasure and well, it's great, but it's not the same as happiness.

Pleasure is correlated with happiness but does not cause it. Ask a drug an addict how his pursuit of pleasure turned out. Ask a cheater who destroyed their family and lost a child how happy they are. Ask how happy a man in his 40's watching Netflix and playing video games all day long how happy they are.

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Pleasure is a false go, it's the most superficial form of satisfaction and that's why it's so easy to 'obtain'. Pleasure is marketed to us constantly and get us focused on, it's what distract us.

"Pleasure is necessary but it's not enough."

Happiness is not the same as positivity.

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You know that person who is always smiling pretty much all the time? Well, they might look positive and happy all the time but the chances of that person being the most dysfunctional person you know are pretty high. Denying negative emotions leads to deeper and more prolonged negative emotions, depression is not far for these people.

Example: I have a friend who used to get yelled by his parents and at work and he would wear a smile on his face saying 'It's okay', that kept repeating, and more garbage was being added and his smile continued there. And then one day he stepped on a fresh poopoo and said  'It's fine', wearing a smile....No! It's not okay! What the fuck is wrong with you?!

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The stress and negative emotions will keep building and pile up till you explode or get in a depression (what actually happened to the person up there) for denying negative feeling. It's a simple reality: Shit happens. Things go all wrong. People upset us. Mistakes are made and negative emotions arise and negative emotions are necessary and healthy to keep one's stable baseline of happiness in life.

And its funny how many people who sign up for 'Always positive' ideology. Tese people should be avoided as much as someone who thinks the world is an endless pile of dog poopoos. If your standard of happiness is always being happy no matter what, then the chances of you being a ticking bomb is pretty high, I really think you need a reality check. Just saying.

I think part of the allure over obsessive positivity comes from what has marketed us. The television subjecting us to smile and be happy. Your friends on social media constantly posting happy moments of their life to show off how 'great and happy' life they live (right..). And somehow I think self-help industry wants you to feel like there's something wrong with you all the time.

Happiness is a process of becoming your ideal self.

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Learning how to play an instrument makes us happier than eating pudding. Raising a child makes us happier than beating a level of Mario. Living by yourself and struggling to pay bills to make us happier than drinking.

All the three examples might be unpleasant to a lot of people and require setting high expectations and potentially failing to always meet them. But that's the catch, most meaningful moments and activities of our lives involves pain, struggle, failures, even anger, and despair, yet once we have done them we look back and get watery eyes about them.

Why? Why do we get emotional looking back at those things?

Because it's these sort of activities that allow us to become our ideal selves. It's the endless pursuit of fulfilling our ideal that grants us the happiness, regardless of superficial pleasure or pain, regardless of negative and positive emotions. This is why some people are happy in war and other sad at their wedding. It's why some are excited to work with long-shifts and other hate parties. That happens because the traits they are inhabiting don't align with their ideal selves.

The result doesn't define our ideal selves. It's not learning how to play something that makes us happy, it's achieving the difficult long-term goal that does. It's not having an awesome kid to be pride that makes us happy, but knowing that you gave everything of you to the growth of another human being that is special. It's not just the freedom of living on your own that makes you happy, it's the process of overcoming all odds against you.

And that's why trying to be happy inevitable will do the opposite. Because if you have to try to be happy, that implies you are not inhabiting your ideal self, you are not linked with the qualities of ho you wish to be. After all, if you really were acting, living your ideal self you wouldn't feel the need of trying to be happy.

There are statements people misunderstand like "find your happiness within" and "knowing you are enough', why they misunderstand? Well, it's not that happiness itself is in you. It's that happiness occurs when you decide to pursue what's in you.

And that's why happiness is so fleeting. People who had achieved major life goals understand and realize that happiness is right there, just one step further. Doesn't matter where you are in life, there will always be one more thing you have to do to be extra happy.

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That's because our ideal selves are just there, two-three steps ahead of us. We dream of becoming a veterinarian and when we are, we dream of having our own clinic and when we have our own clinic, we dream of sheltering all stray dogs and cats. And what matters isn't just what we achieved in each of these dreams, but that we are constantly moving towards them, day after day. Month after month. Year after year. And we will continue to follow the path of our ideal selves throughout life.

Are you happy?

The best advice regarding be happy is the simplest: Imagine who you want to be and then just step towards it. Have a big dream? Then do something. Anything. The simple act of moving towards will change how you feel about the entire process and that will inspire you.

The fantasy. The dream. The imagined results are merely tools to get you off your tushy. Doesn't matter if they will come true or not. Live. Just live. Stop trying to be happy and just be.

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