CxD #279: Source of your troubles + Happiness ingredients
Identifying with your thoughts is the source of most troubles.
In doing so, you are like a fly stuck in a vat of tar. 🪰
Or honey, if you have a sweet tooth. 🍯
You spend most of your time living inside your mind’s projections: stories, interpretations, judgments, complaints, worries, obsessions, evaluations, speculations, conjectures, and fantasies.
You confuse these bubbles of thought for reality itself.
Learn to create some distance from them.
Sit still and be for a while.
If you’re in the market for a Happiness equation— first consider happiness to be a slippery concept and one that—in its idealized form— might not be as beneficial as you think.
Next, cautiously proceed to examine these three necessary ingredients:
Find value and meaning in what you do. You must have some cause or craft or work or sport or project to care about.
Find and cultivate deep and meaningful relationships. People on their deathbed rarely claim they wish they had made fewer intimate friends.
Find something to look forward to. Life is energy. It requires momentum to keep from getting stuck or pulled apart by despair or lethargy. See and feel with clarity why you are getting out of bed tomorrow.
Bonus: —I’m gifting you an article from The Atlantic about the purported multi-vitamin effect of marriage as the most potent intimate relationship of all: The Happiness Trinity
“Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America,” Wilcox writes. “When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.” According to survey data from Gallup, matrimony improves every flavor of well-being you can think of. Married couples experience more “enjoyment,” less “worry,” less “sadness,” less “stress,” less “anger,” and much, much less “loneliness.”
I’m whisking myself off to a Zen retreat for a spell, to reconnect with my body and heart-mind and to have a legit reason to not be pushed and pulled by my pocket-computer-casino-addiction-phone-machine-monster.
May you all take ‘er easy.
Bonus tune I’ve been playing loud:
Steal the lights from our eyes
Take my blood from my heart
We're in all of this dark matter
Take the breaths from my chest
Take the pulse and I'm outta line
We're losing time, dark matter
Denounce the demagogues
King diamond to discard
Deplore the dialogue
Your word against the law
It's strange these days
When everybody else pays
For someone else's mistake
This blame takes shape
Still everybody else pays
For someone else's mistake
You're running away
We're pulling apart
In all of this dark matter
I once heard a sin
And now it's stuck in my head
Or is it the press?
No one knows what happens next
Renounce the demigods
King diamond to discard
Deplore the dialogue
Your word against the law
It's strange these days
When everybody else pays
For someone else's mistake
This blame takes shape
Still everybody else pays
For someone else's mistake
No tolerance for intolerance, intolerance for-
No patience left for impatience no more
No love lost for lost loves
No sorrow for the unaccountable
It's strange these days
When everybody else pays
For someone else's mistake
This blame takes shape
Still everybody else pays
For someone else's mistake