No offense, but the first thing to keep in mind if you really want to be happy is to realize that you probably don’t have any idea of how to go about being it. While you might think that that a bigger house, a nicer car, living in a existential paradise, or a life of travel and vacation will bring you happiness, you probably couldn’t be farther from the truth. Because here’s the thing, that sort of happiness is based on a completely un-subjective fantasy that each of us invents and it’s 99% ego and 1% reality.
This very mentality based on greed, insecurity, envy and malcontent is ruining your life. The fact is, you are and always have been you – no more and no less. Pouring gasoline on the fire of your own insecurities isn’t going to make anything better, and believing that you actually need a bunch of ridiculous stuff to attain happiness is just silly.
So what is ‘happy’ anyway? What if it was letting go of your ego? What if it was letting go of all the preconceptions you’ve walled yourself in with your whole life? What if it was learning to look into the future while actually embracing the present? What if it was finding what you love and holding on to it instead of chasing after what you think everyone else wants you to have?
We live in a society that tells us that ‘happy’ is the fruit that’s out of our reach. It’s that beautiful girl you dreamed about until she gave you her heart. Now she’s part of your greed driven existence that seeks only what it doesn’t have and you’re already trying to bed your next conquest.
Think of the most beautiful moment you ever shared with someone and realize that you are the only one preventing every moment from having the same kind of beautiful impact. It’s human nature to take everything that means so much as an aspiration and make it meaningless once we’ve got it. But what if we learned to look at things differently? What if we learned to appreciate everything with the same fervor every time we experienced it? Imagine how in love you’d be with your partner, how happy you’d be at your job, how unspeakably awesome everything you owned would be?
It’s too easy to look at everything as obvious – the people we love, where we live, our jobs, our possessions – nothing is exempt from being made meaningless by the human mind. But here’s the reality. We live on a sphere that’s orbiting a massive burning ball of exploding gas at about 67,000 miles per hour. You’re made up 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion give or take) atoms, and these atoms somehow all come together to form the blob of matter (that is you). If that’s not weird enough, think about this – 99.9999999999999% of your 7 octillion atom existence is made up of space, void – nothing! You hang in a delicate balance of unfathomable complexity – anything could change at any moment.
55,000 people die every hour on this planet, yet we look at our sphere as secure, our friends as here forever, our families as eternal entities, but they’re not and the truth is that every single person you know is going to die and you’re going to die. The only thing you have is the gift to experience, and if you’ve decided to put a clause requiring a major landmark on your own happiness, most of your life is essentially a miserable occupancy of space. One day it’ll be too late and you’ll have regrets piling up that aren’t ever going away.
Don’t worry about where you are or what you have or even what you think you want. Take one step at a time and worry only about only this – who you are – who you really are. Find what you love, love what makes you happy – try giving instead of getting, try caring instead of hating. Remove the mindless distractions from your life and focus on the things and people that matter the most to you. Follow your heart to discover what makes you happy, never let go of it, never devalue anything that is beautiful, and build a life that lets you be yourself.
