This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 292. Stop trying to be happy. Part one by Mark Manson and Mark Manson. Get ready to maximize your potential with Optimal Living Daily, the podcast that brings you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week.
Your Optimal Life awaits. Now here's your host, Justin Mullick. How's it going on, Life Optimizer? Welcome back to Optimal Living Daily, where I read you from some of the best personal development blogs I can find, without the permission, of course.
And today's no different. I'll be reading a post from Mark Manson, the popular personal development blogger who started out as a dating coach, actually. And he has a new book out. It's pretty crude, but entertaining, and definitely has some great life lessons.
But I'll mention a little more about that at the end of the episode, so let's get right into the post and start optimizing your life. Stop trying to be happy, part one, by Mark Manson and Mark Manson.net. 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, since then throwing a socket wrench at the neighbor's kids, you are not self-conscious about your state of anger. You are not thinking to yourself, am I feeling 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 doesn't wonder if he's happy. He simply is. What this implies is that happiness is not achieved in itself, but rather it is a side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experiences. This gets mixed up a lot, especially since happiness is marked as 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. Happiness is not the same as pleasure. When most people see happiness, they're actually seeking pleasure, good food, more time for TV and movies, a new car, parties with friends, full body massages, losing 10 pounds, becoming more popular, 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. As can he drug addicts, how their pursuit of pleasure turned out. As an adulterer who shattered her family and lost her children, whether pleasure ultimately made her happy. As a man who almost ate himself to death, how happy pursuing pleasure made him feel.
Pleasure is a false God. Research shows that 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 fix it on. It's what we use to numb and distract ourselves. The pleasure, while necessary, isn't sufficient. There's something more.
Happiness does not require lowering one's expectations. A popular narrative lately is that people are becoming unhappier because we're all narcissistic and grouping told that we're special, unique snowflakes, we're 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 we've been wondering 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 tried it most of his savings, trying to make it work, and failed. Today, he's happier than ever for his experience. He taught him many lessons about what he wanted and didn't want in life, and 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 that actually argues 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 $100,000 and drive a Porsche immediately out of college, then your standards of success were skewed and superficial. You could use 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 $100,000 salary, it's working to reach a $100,000 salary, and then working for a $200,000 salary and so on. So I say raise your expectations, elongate your process, lay on your deathbed with a to-do list of mile-long and smile at the infant 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 rock crumb around you, because that's how something amazing grows through the cracks. Happiness is not the same as positivity.
Hear that in tomorrow's episode. You just listened to part one of the post title Stop Trying to Be Happy by Mark Manson and Mark Manson on Net. I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on. Superpower finally takes the guessing out of it.
One simple app test covers over 100 biomarkers and their app gives you a complete picture of your heart, liver, hormones, metabolism, even environmental toxins. Plus it used to cost $499 right now, it's just $199. And head to superpower.com and use code old at checkout for an additional $20 off your membership. And like I mentioned at the top of the show, Mark has a new book out titled There's a subtle art of not giving a F, and as you can deduce, they're playing bad words in it, but I've read some of it to you on this podcast and it really is valuable.
You can check it out over at markmanson.net. And if you'd like to help support this show, I'd greatly appreciate anything you can do to help keep it growing and going financial or otherwise. I put up a how-to-help page at oldpodcast.com, you can check out the direct link is oldpodcast.com slash support. And I really appreciate if you take a look, anything on that list is a long way to support the podcast.
And I think that does it for today, have a great rest of your day, and I'll catch you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits. Hey, this is Dan from the Optimal Finance Daily Podcast, which is a lot like this show, except more focused on personal finance. Justin handpicks the best posts he can find from blogs and authors like Ramit Sadie, Mr. Money Moustache, and more, and I read them to you five days a week.
So if you enjoy this podcast, come on over and subscribe to Optimal Finance Daily, too. And together, we'll optimize your financial life. You've been listening to Optimal Living Daily. Be sure to hit the subscribe button to stay up-to-date on each new episode, and head to oldpodcast.com.
That's OLDpodcast.com for a free gift, as well as more actionable tips and resources that help you maximize your potential. Thanks for joining us, and remember, your Optimal Life awaits.