WHAT DRIVES HAPPINESS?

If you have to try to be cool, you will never be cool. If you have to try to be happy, then you will never be happy. Maybe the problem these days is people are just trying too hard. Happiness, like other emotions, is not something you obtain, but rather something you inhabit. When you’re raging pissed and angry about that bad grade you have in stylistics, you are not self-conscious about your state of anger. You are not thinking to yourself, “Am I finally angry? Am I doing this right?” No, you’re out for blood. You inhabit and live the anger. You are the anger. And then it’s gone. Just as a confident man doesn’t wonder if he’s confident, a happy man does not wonder if he’s happy. He simply is. What this implies is that happiness is not achieved in itself, but rather it is the side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experiences. This gets mixed up a lot, especially since happiness is marketed so much these days as a goal in and of itself. Buy X and be happy. Learn Y and be happy. But you can’t buy happiness and you can’t achieve happiness. It just is. And it is once you get other parts of your life in order.

When most people seek happiness, they are actually seeking pleasure: good food, more sex, more time for TV and movies, a new car, parties with friends, full body massages, becoming more popular, getting more salary or allowance and so on. But while pleasure is great, it’s not the same as happiness. Pleasure is correlated with happiness, but does not cause it. Ask any drug addict how their pursuit of pleasure turned out. Ask an adulterer who shattered her family and lost her children whether pleasure ultimately made her happy. Pleasure is a false god. People who focus their energy on materialistic and superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable and less happy in the long-run. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest. Pleasure is what’s marketed to us. It’s what we fixate on. It’s what we use to numb and distract ourselves. But pleasure, while necessary, isn’t sufficient.

A popular narrative lately is that people are becoming unhappier because we’re all self-absorbed and grew up being told that we’re special unique people who are going to change the world and we have Facebook constantly telling us how amazing everyone else’s lives are, but not our own, so we all feel like crap and wonder where it all went wrong. Oh, and all of this happens by the age of 23. Sorry, but no. Give people a bit more credit than that. For instance, a friend of mine recently started a high-risk business venture. He dried up most of his savings trying to make it work and failed. Today, he’s happier than ever for his experience. It taught him many lessons about what he wanted and didn’t want in life and it eventually led him to his current job, which he loves. He’s able to look back and be proud that he went for it because otherwise he would have always wondered “what if?” and that would have made him unhappier than any failure would have.

The failure to meet our own expectations is not antithetical to happiness, and I’d actually argue that the ability to fail and still appreciate the experience is actually a fundamental building block for happiness. If you thought you were going to make #200,000 monthly and drive a Range Rover immediately out of University, then your standards of success were skewed and superficial, you confused your pleasure for happiness, and the painful smack of reality hitting you in the face will be one of the best lessons life ever gives you. The “lower expectations” argument falls victim to the same old mindset: that happiness is derived from without. The joy of life is not having a #200,000 salary. It’s working to reach a #200,000 salary, and then working for a #500,000 salary, and so on. So, I say raise your expectations. Elongate your process. Lie on your death bed with a to-do list a mile long and smile at the infinite opportunity granted to you. Create ridiculous standards for yourself and then savor the inevitable failure. Learn from it. Live it. Let the ground crack and rocks crumble around you because that’s how something amazing grows, through the cracks.

Happiness is not the same as positivity. Chances are you know someone who always appears to be insanely happy regardless of the circumstances or situation. Chances are this is actually one of the most dysfunctional people you know. Denying negative emotions leads to deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and emotional dysfunction. It’s a simple reality: shit happens. Things go wrong. People upset us. Mistakes are made and negative emotions arise. And that’s fine. Negative emotions are necessary and healthy for maintaining stable baseline happiness in one’s life. There’s a lot of people out there who subscribe to “always be positive” ideology. These people should be avoided just as much as someone who thinks the world is an endless pile of shit. If your standard of happiness is that you’re always happy, no matter what, then you’ve been watching way too much rainbows and sunshine movies. Or maybe it’s just that we’re lazy, and like anything else we want the result without actually having to do the hard work for it.

This brings me to what actually drives happiness….Writing final exams make us happier than eating jollof rice, Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game (for parents). Starting a small business with friends and struggling to make money makes us happier than buying shoes and jeans. And the funny thing is that all three of the activities above are exceedingly unpleasant and require setting high expectations and potentially failing to always meet them. Yet, they are some of the most meaningful moments and activities of our lives. They involve pain, struggle, even anger and despair. Why? This is because it’s these sort of activities which allow us to become satisfied with ourselves. It’s the perpetual pursuit of fulfilling ourselves which grants us happiness, regardless of superficial pleasures or pain, regardless of positive or negative emotions. This is why some people are happy at work and others are not-so-excited at weddings; it’s because some are excited to that one more thing you work and others hate parties.

And this is the reason that trying to be happy inevitably will make you unhappy. Because to try to be happy implies that you are not at ease your real self, you are not aligned with the qualities of who you wish to be. After all, if you were acting out your real self, then you wouldn’t feel the need to try to be happy.  And this is why happiness is so fleeting. Anyone who has set out major life goals for themselves, only to achieve them and realize that they feel the same relative amounts of happiness/unhappiness, knows that happiness always feels like it’s around the corner just waiting for you to show up. No matter where you are in life, there will always be the need to do to be extra-especially happy.

And with that, with regards to being happy, it seems the best advice is also the simplest: Imagine who you want to be and then step towards it. Dream big and then do something. Anything. The simple act of moving at all will change how you feel about the entire process and serve to inspire you further. Let go of the imagined result — it’s not necessary. The fantasy and the dream are merely tools to get you off your ass. It doesn’t matter if they come true or not. Live, man. Just live. I was asked the question recently about what makes me happy and I couldn’t quite answer the question straight, without going round the houses a few times. Without putting a total damper on things, when we’ve lived with trauma and conditions attached to our life, I don’t believe we own that particular feeling. True happiness is a soul thing. It comes from the soul. It’s what our soul has or hasn’t had. If our soul has and continues to be nurtured, we will be happy. I feel blessed to have my family in my life , but inwardly there is no getting away that I have lived with trauma. Trauma has shaped my life. It’s not to say given half the chance I wouldn’t jump at the chance, but I would have had to have a different life for that to happen. I do the best with the chance I’ve been given. Being happy comes from the soul. It’s not that someone can’t make you happy, because certain people can, but unless you take out all the other factors you started with and in some circumstances still continue to live with, you’re never going to be happy. When our lives are conditioned, our soul is conditioned and it’s that conditioning that stops us from being genuinely happy. We must try to at least dig deep and peel back the layers. Take away any daily stress, surround and continue to surround ourselves with people that we know can make us happy and make a difference, where we didn’t have that before.

Many of us have been believing in a lie. We’ve bought into the myth that happiness is something we achieve when everything in our life finally looks the way we’ve been thinking it should. Cue the relationship, ring, job, country house, wardrobe, vacations, beauty products, weight loss. But here’s the challenge: These things alone don’t create lasting happiness, so happiness becomes this elusive thing that we desire but don’t know how to achieve. The truth is that happiness is not circumstantial. And this is really good news. It means we don't have to wait for everything to be perfect, nor do we have to control anything outside of ourselves in order to feel a certain way. Becoming aware of this truth is a total game-changer, because it means we can choose happiness. And something beautiful happens when we do this: When we feel happy first, our outward experience begins to shift in ways we’d only dreamed of.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we will be happy as soon as everything in our lives is exactly the way we want it to be—and that the solution to happiness is that we must keep working harder to control these external situations in order to make them “right.” But when we make things happen (buy that phone, get the relationship, get the extra salary, get that ‘A’ that can make your gp higher, graduate with that first class) in a condition in which we are needing them to fill us up, validate us, or make us feel whole and complete, these changes won’t be sustainable. We might even realize these outward things don’t make us happy after all.

In reality, self-love is the baseline of happiness. When we live from a pure space of self-love, we are able to achieve sustainable happiness, because our internal feelings of abundance will reflect back to us in the form of beautiful relationships, purpose-driven work, and financial freedom. In short, self-love puts us on the fast track to healing. Our work is to clear out our fearful perceptions and shift them back to a loving perspective on life, which reveals our perfection and wholeness. We don’t need to be fixed and nothing is wrong with us—these are just the stories we’ve been telling ourselves. When we let go of our limiting beliefs, we can finally experience freedom, happiness, and our highest potential.

                         

Despite what we may have been taught, happiness is as simple as just choosing to be happy. When we truly realize this—that happiness is a choice—we instantly empower ourselves in any situation, whether it’s a relationship, job, or pattern of thinking that's been creating judgments, worry, doubt, fear, or confusion. The moment we choose to perceive things differently by choosing a loving perception of ourselves, others, and our circumstances, we not only strengthen our capacity to feel happy—we also open ourselves up to limitless possibilities where there once was seemingly no solution. A creative flow reveals itself, and we're able to experience more ease and fewer struggles sometimes instantly.

When we tap into this relaxed energy, we allow that which we desire to flow to us in a miraculous way. The job, relationship, or whatever we are envisioning and desiring for our lives is all on its way—and when we surrender our plans for the timeline and the form in which we think it should arrive, we allow an even bigger and better outcome to take place. When we are not fearfully boxing ourselves in, we are able to fearlessly say YES to limitless opportunities for joy to enter our lives.