Happiness is one of those emotions that everyone wants to optimize in their life. I do not talk to very many people who say:
“I have too much happiness in my life”.
And while we all want more of it, we are not necessarily very skilled in understanding where the source of our happiness lies. We make predictions and assessments about it, then extrapolate those observations into decision making.
Here are a few things that I have observed recently within myself:
Food makes me happy, therefore I eat foods that are unhealthy. Control makes me happy, so I obsess about the exercise I do and the foods I eat. Companionship makes me happy, so I put pressure on others to provide that companionship. Obtaining social statuses makes me happy, therefore think about buying cars, clothes and houses that demonstrate I have achieved something. Simplicity makes me happy, so I reject many of the potentially beneficial opportunities I have given because they would ‘complicate life’. (This creates a lot of cognitive dissonance with the previous point) These are just a few examples, I am sure that you can come up with a list of your own.
The challenge with happiness is that it is a very ephemeral emotion. It can change by the week, day or even hour. While I often speak about happiness, because of its ephemeral nature, I find more stability in seeking meaning and purpose and feel blessed when happiness is a byproduct of that effort.
That being said, I still want to optimize my own happiness. And I believe that when it comes to experiencing happiness, it is valuable to take ownership of its source.
This is especially true if you are sourcing happiness from somewhere outside of yourself, such as my examples listed previously. When you outsource your happiness it can be lost, stolen, devalued or disregarded. People are imperfect, which means relying on someone else is failable. Materials can be broken or deteriorate, which by definition means that the happiness is temporary.
This does not mean that you should live life jaded, cynical and full of skepticism!
It does not mean that you should not trust people or buy things. The point is that you want to live a life where your emotional stability and experience of happiness is generated from within.
Let me be very real about this.
What if you do not feel in control? What if you do not trust yourself with this responsibility?
These are two very difficult questions for me. I often do not trust myself to be a source of my own happiness. I want new things. I desire someone to outsource this responsibility to. The idea of owning this responsibility is empowering, but also scares the shit out of me. I have failed myself too many times in the past, so it seems safer to trust something or someone else.
That fear is real. Although I intellectually understand that this is something I need to own.
If you are like me, then you need to develop a style of living that allows you gain confidence, control and the ability to manage. I have been woeful of this in the past, primarily because of complacency and laziness. This particularly happens when I feel that life is moving along and I am living in “a good place”. I become lacking in the tools and habits that help me.
The following are some of those tools:
connecting with and spending time with friends in meaningful ways exercise / running writing spending time nurturing my spiritual life I have spent a lot of time in the blog posts discussing the value I derive from running and writing. There is a week in the Happier and Healthier You program focused on developing social support as you work on building new habits. But one of the topics that I have not spent much time discussing is the topic of nurturing a healthy spiritual life.
The topic of religion and the human spirit is a challenge for me, but over the past 9 months I have chosen to invest in gaining an understanding of what that means. The questions that I am seeking answers to include the following:
Why did my participation in a community of people seeking spiritual answers come to a sudden stop?
Why did I completely remove any appreciation of a spiritual life and replace it with what I would describe as science and data analysis.
How come my personal happiness and ability to derive meaning from life feel lacking, when I can not approach spiritual topics?
As some of you read this, I am sure the skeptics will note that looking for a spiritual answer is just outsourcing this responsibility. There are moments that I agree with this criticism. But I have been cautious about identifying this journey with any specific person, church or group. Those guardrails have allowed me to take on this journey with some confidence.
It is definitely a journey I have found worth pursuing to this point.
The desire to be happy is a powerful motivator. It can cause us to do all kinds of things that are positive and negative in our lives. When it comes to my happiness, I know a few things:
I need to own my happiness
There are tools that are valuable and help me along the way
I am still inadequate at maintaining ownership of my happiness at all times
Finding purpose and/or meaning that doesn’t exist within other people or things is important and why I’m seeking to understand if it came come from a space I don’t fully understand - a spiritual life.