This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 293. Stop trying to be happy. Part two by Mark Manson of Mark Manson.net. 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 Molick. Hello, hello and welcome to the Optimal Living Daily podcast. The podcast where I get permission from authors of some of the best blogs on the planet and read them to you all for free.
I'm Justin Molick, your very own personal narrator. And now today's episode is a continuation from yesterday, it's a longer post from Mark Manson. And I like to keep these episodes fairly short, so I often break up longer posts. If you're new here, you're probably want to hear yesterday's episode first.
That's episode 292, so that this makes a lot more sense to you. And with that, let's jump right in and start optimizing your life. Stop trying to be happy. Part two by Mark Manson of mark Manson.net.
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. It 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 a stable baseline happiness in one's life. The trick with negative emotions is to, number one, express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner, and number two, express them in a way which aligns with your values.
Simple example, a value of mine is to pursue non-violence. Therefore, when I get mad at somebody, I express that anger, but I also make a point not to punch them in the face. Radical idea, I know. But I absolutely will throw a socket wrench at the neighbor's kids.
Try me. 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 pilot. If your standard of happiness is that you're always happy, no matter what, then you've been watching way too much to beaver and need a reality check.
But don't worry, I promise not to punch you in the face. I think part of the allure of obsessive positivity is the way which we're marketed to. I think part of it is being subjected to happy, smiley people on television constantly. I think part of it are some people in the self-help industry that want you to feel like there's something wrong with you all the time.
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, which brings me to what actually drives happiness. Happiness is the process of becoming your ideal self. Completing marathon makes us happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising a child makes us happier than being a video game.
Starting a small business with friends and struggling to make money makes us happier than buying a new computer. 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.
Yet once we've done them, we look back and get missed the eye about them. Why? Because it's these sort of activities which allows us to become our ideal selves. It's a perpetual pursuit of fulfilling our ideal selves which grants us happiness, regardless of superficial pleasures or pain, regardless of positive or negative emotions.
This is why some people are happy and more and others are sad at weddings. It's why some are excited to work and others hate parties. The traits that are inhabiting don't align with their ideal selves. The end results don't define our ideal selves.
It's not finishing the marathon that makes us happy. It's achieving a difficult long-term goal that does. It's not having an awesome kid to show off that makes us happy but knowing that you gave yourself up to the growth of another human being that is special. It's not the prestige and money from the new business that makes you happy.
It's the process of overcoming all odds with people you care about. 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 already inhabiting your ideal self. You are not aligned with the qualities of who you wish to be. After all, if you were acting out your ideal self then you wouldn't feel the need to try to be happy.
Cue statements about finding happiness within and knowing that you're enough. It's not that happiness itself is in you. It's that happiness occurs when you decide to pursue what's in you. 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 and 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 that one more thing you need to do to be extra especially happy. And that's because our ideal self is always just around that corner, always three steps ahead of us. We dream of being a musician.
And when we're a musician we dream of writing a film score. And when we write a film score, we dream of writing a screenplay. And what matters isn't that we achieve each of these plateaus of success, but that we're consistently moving towards them day after day, month after month, year after year. The plateaus will come and go and will continue following our ideal self down the path of our lives.
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 eyes.
It doesn't matter if they come true or not. Live man, just live. Stop trying to be happy and just be. You just listen to part two of the post titled, Stop Trying to Be Happy by Mark Manson of Mark Manson.net.
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