The 1 Answer to Unhappiness
Level 3: Master of the Mundane
I need to preface this article with an important message.
This article is all about happiness and unhappiness, and finding the one thing you can do in life to recover your happiness if you feel you are unhappy or discontent.
But, there are times in our life where sadness, unhappiness, depression, they are so greatly weighing down on us that we become unable to help ourselves --
It is OK to be in that position. That is normal. That is human.
And if you feel like you are in a place where you cannot find happiness, that everything else is weighing you down, we want to encourage you to reach out for help. Especially if you are struggling with addiction, please visit Genius Recovery.1
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Future Guardian,
We live in a world of more.
It's the shining beacon of capitalism. Buy things. Get what you want. New is better.
Yet in the cold honest light of day when all else is laid bare I'd wager to say that what anyone reading this article is most likely to desire in their life is happiness.
Don't you just want to be happy?
And how many times in your life have you been unhappy or discontent and so many of your choices have revolved around making that feeling go away so that you can find happiness again?
So we end up surrounded by ideas, expectations, offers all which promise to give us the happiness we desire.
You're unhappy?
Well, why don't you try doing this thing? Why don't you try buying these new clothes? What don't you try getting a new car? Why don't you try a new relationship?
The idea that, when we feel unhappy it can be solved - we can find our happiness again - by getting something new, getting more, that the answer to our problems is something we can get from someone else, that we can buy it ...
It so normalized it almost makes sense. It makes sense that if you're unhappy you should go do something new, change something, etc
It sounds correct. If I'm unhappy, something is broken, and I need to go get something to fix it, right?
How much of our world is based on this?
Based on acquisition and consumption as a solution to our problems?
It's easy to buy a solution. Build a solution. Get something as a solution.
But,
What if we have Happiness and Unhappiness all wrong?
I think, no matter what your situation in life, we all find ourselves from time to time feeling like we are not happy, and in every one of those situations ...
There's only ONE answer that makes sense.
But first,
What is Happiness and What Causes Unhappiness?
Yikes.
I think I accidentally stumbled myself into a sea of existential uncertainty.
How am I supposed to succinctly yet thoroughly talk about what happiness and unhappiness are?
Do I even need to do that?
Don't we all know what happiness and unhappiness are?
Well,
Maybe not.
I think, especially in this modern era of connected-information-dopamine-overload it may be more difficult than ever to naturally recognize what happiness is.
Perhaps I can make an analogy here, and relate this to how it's really difficult to be able to internally discern when I've had enough to eat when it comes to highly processed foods. Potato chips for example. It's really really easy for me to eat an entire day's worth of food in potato chips without having that natural internal voice say "yo that's good, we've eaten enough."
With happiness, I'm not sure it's that simple. But to me there are similarities.
Consider how overexposed we are to what people claim is happiness. One might argue this to be the essential foundation of all social media. We are drawn to other people's expression of happiness and the "good" and interesting lives they are leading because we ourselves feel dissatisfied (though we often, or perhaps usually can't explain why).
Yet when you look behind the scenes, I think it's safe to say most people posting on social media aren't really happy. They've created a façade for whatever other purpose they have in gaining attention on those platforms.
Ok I'll back out of that conversation for a moment and acknowledge that yes people do use social media for ... well ... social connection. (Though, and I think this is an entirely different article/book, I have my personal doubts that this virtual social connection really serves the inner need we have for human connection)
My point is,
That realm is a prime example of how we both mis-express happiness, and mis-interpret happiness, in others and in ourselves.
To me the clearest ... culprit, shall we say ... is dopamine.
How often have you conflated the feeling you get from dopamine with the feeling of happiness?
How often have you conflated the feeling of lust with love?
This is the dangerous dynamic of dopamine.
If we confuse happiness for the feeling we get from dopamine, then we end up chasing dopamine, especially easy dopamine, which inevitably results in the fall from the heights of dopamine, and in our mind we think we're on a happiness/unhappiness rollercoaster, all the way not even recognizing what happiness really even is for us.
(See The Real Cost of Dopamine2 for more clarity on what I'm talking about there)
What, then, is happiness?
Let's step back to the beginnings of our lives.
As I write this it's summer, and our youngest is about 18 months old. Runs around everywhere, climbs things, gets into all sorts of baby trouble, and as much as is possible he talks. It sounds like babbling unless you understand the context.
I wrote something inspired by this the other day.
Right now he's absolutely enamored with the slides at the park nearby. And whenever he thinks we might go for a walk he starts bursting out with "EHHWHEEEE!!!" (imagine a tiny human shouting wee)
All smiles. All giggles. He's even started doing this thing when he's super exited where he scrunches himself up and sort of fiddles/steeples his fingers together with a grin on his face almost like Mr. Burns but replace the evil with unbridled joy (and the crispy old man with a cute baby).
All of our boy's life he has been what we'd call an exceptionally happy baby. Yes he expresses sadness sometimes, he cries, he's even now showing a lot more facial expression and leans into what I'd call concern.
What is happiness for him?
And how did he learn it?
How did he come to feel the happiness and express it?
My take:
I think we are born with the ability to feel the highs, feel the lows, and to naturally settle into being happy.
To me happiness is very closely related to contentedness. Where we have what we want and need and we can share in the natural enjoyment of being alive and living a life of discovery and growth.
That's happiness in my eyes.
You might think happiness and sadness are opposites because that's how they are often colloquially connected, but I honestly don't think happiness has an opposite.
I think happiness is the clearest form of ourselves living unrestrained as the truest us we can be.
It's like life.
The opposite of death is not life, it's birth, because life is everlasting - we simply are born into it and then one day leave it through death.
The opposite of sadness is not happiness it's joy.
How do I know?
Well,
I've got this pure baby here who's known nothing but a good life where he's allowed to be who he is. He's learned to express happiness by seeing us smile with him, laugh with him.
Just like we are born with all the uniqueness that we are and society, culture, family, etc, all pile on top of us expectation and misunderstanding, to the point where our job is to chip away all that we are not to find all that we are ...
We are also born happy.
And life piles on expectation, misunderstanding, etc, to bury that happiness beneath layers of confusion and unmet desire and need to the point where we can't see our own happiness anymore for all the things in the way of it ...
And so our job to find that happiness again is to chip away all that is covering it.
So what does it mean to be unhappy?
What does it mean to be discontent?
What does it mean to be sad, frustrated, depressed, lost, confused?
Another rabbit hole that means something different to each person who reads this. YOU know the feeling of unhappiness, of discontentedness, of sadness, of frustration, of being lost, confused.
I know this because you are human.
(And if any non-humans are reading this, please feel free to reach out, I'd love a chat)
How can I put to words that feeling for you?
Unhappiness, discontentedness, the feeling of not having what you want, the feeling that you want to escape where you are now, the slowly burdening feeling that you don't want to do what you're doing anymore, you dread the day when you wake up in the morning ...
We call it unhappiness not because it's the opposite of happiness,
But because we lack the feeling of being happy.
Though we often usually use it to mean in effect what we think we identify as the opposite of happiness - dishappiness, perhaps.
A disharmony within ourselves.
A sadness that is growing.
But in effect it's the void that grows when you are unable to be in a space where you consider yourself to be happy.
Because happiness is filling.
Unhappiness is emptying.
In the truest sense of the meaning of those words to our own sense of self and well being.
Unhappiness is perhaps then not necessarily a thing that you experience, but a lack of something else that you are experiencing feeling.
If we consider that happiness is the simply the truest form of ourselves being able to live and be in the world - possibly without desire for more or different - what many people might consider contentedness,
Then I would say unhappiness is not a state where you don't have happiness, but rather a personal blindness to the happiness within you.
Happiness is in us.
But if we are unable to see it because of all the things in the way of our perception of ourselves, then we will deeply feel the absence of that feeling of harmony in self presence.
And THAT is the manifestation of unhappiness.
The growing void of sensing the disconnect from what you could be.
And it's in that growing void where many would like you to spend money to fill the gap. To reach for more. To do more. To have more.
Because it's a void, a gap, a "missing thing" that appears to be growing in your life, it only makes sense that you ought to fill it.
The problem is
The reason you can't feel your happiness isn't because something is missing, its' because you have a bunch of stuff in the way of feeling it.
The solution most often taken
So when we feel down, unhappy, discontent with our lives we look to fill the gap of silence that grows when we're unable to see and hear our own happiness
We think new and change is the answer.
New project.
New business.
New job.
New city.
New relationship.
New clothes.
New computer.
New phone.
New tv.
New car.
New course.
New teacher.
New information.
new, add, new, add, new, add
We pile on more and more stuff thinking that the missing link is something we need to go get. The thing that's keeping us from being happy is a bridge we have to build and we need to add stuff to our lives in order to do it.
We are so bought into the idea that adding and experiencing something new not only fixes our happiness but it is happiness.
We see the feeling that we get from all the new things we are adding, and we say THAT feeling is happiness.
But no.
That feeling is dopamine.
And all you are doing by adding more to your life, by seeking new, is not only flooding yourself with dopamine, but is also continuing to pile on more and more stuff - whether physical, mental, or emotional - which stands in the way of you seeing your own happiness.
MORE leads to that sense of unhappiness of discontent because more is just making it harder to see and hear the happiness in you, which creates and adds to that void that more is trying to fill.
If you agree with the above, then there's only one answer
Only one answer to "solving" your state of unhappiness, of discontent.
Only one thing that makes sense to do when you are not happy in your life.
It's not to add.
It's to remove.
Because in removing you take away the things which are in the way of seeing the happiness in you.
Removing not only increases the likelihood you will experience happiness because of that dynamic, it also takes away things which drive you further up and down on the dopamine rollercoaster.
And, if you read last week's article3, you'll recall that removing also decreases risk. Less risk = less variance. Less variance down is what you want if what you seek is happiness.
Removing is your greatest "Raise the Floor"4 move for your own happiness and sense of well being ...
Because the more you remove, the more you decrease the likelihood that the void is created between yourself and your own happiness that always exists within you.
What does removing look like?
I can't make this prescriptive.
It's up to you to look in yourself and your life and figure out the things which are caked on through years of living as a human in this world, those things which block the way for you to see the happiness (as well as your own uniqueness) inside of you.
Sometimes its easy to see what you can remove and cut because its things.
You can do yourself a mental exercise and think through what it would feel like to get rid of every physical possession you have.
Would that be difficult?
If you'd find that emotional difficult, then you might actually have some things standing in the way of your happiness. Because there's nothing like stuff to attach boundless external expectation onto which layers into your life and perception of who you are and how you should live.
Ever carry around a box of possessions for years only to have it sit hidden in a storage unit or a garage forever unseen?
I know I have.
But lets make this more difficult.
Because often the stuff to cut is stuff that is very hard to see.
Expectation.
Self Perception.
A need to be correct.
A need to not be wrong.
Sometimes things we think we need to cut are not things that we actually want to be cutting.
Relationships.
Commitments.
Obligations.
Maybe we really do need to cut some of those things. But maybe there's something else which is making those seem like they need to be cut.
I can't speak for you in this, or even give you examples. It's all too unique and personal for that to make sense.
But,
Here's an idea.
What if we think about the things we need to cut in our lives like constraints.
In which case I advise listening to these episodes of the Arena podcast:
![Identifying The Constraint [ 2 of 3 ]](https://i.scdn.co/image/ab6765630000ba8a9f3aba098b1a2eacabd55f4f)
(You can start with the one on Constraints5 there, or at the beginning in the podcast section)6
I'm going to take some stuff from there.
And propose we take the 3 core prompts for identifying your most immediate constraint, and consider these in identifying the things we might most readily cut from our lives right now to help us see our happiness.
1 - What is the smallest cut that will have the biggest impact on your happiness?
(Careful not to fall into the Dopamine trap on this, when I say "biggest impact on your happiness" I don't mean something that makes you feel really good - see all the above thus far for more clarity)
This is possibly the central question to always ask, or if unanswerable, to find yourself coming back to eventually.
Because we always want to make the smallest movement we can that has the biggest impact.
As an extreme example ... and I can't speak from experience so this is an outside perspective:
You might be in a terrible situation in your marriage and feel like divorce is the answer. That's a very extreme level of cutting. And it might be the right answer, that's for you to decide.
But,
Maybe there's a much smaller cut you can make that might have an outsized impact on the situation for the two of you. And you might chose to make all the smaller cuts before making the larger ones.
Like ... perhaps try cutting the need to be correct (or not wrong).
2 - What's the one thing, if cut, would fix most things (bringing you closer to happiness)?
This is another version of biggest impact for a single move.
I can give an example from my own experience as a writer, freelance copywriter, and entrepreneur.
One of the most positively impactful things I've done which has improved my writing and my work across the board has been my internal rigidity to a specific vision. That is, especially in my writing, whenever I let go (cut) of the need for what I'm writing to look a certain way, everything about my writing improves.
When I realized that and cut that thread, that thing I was holding onto, the rigidity to idea, the perfectionism, the whatever-it-might-be-perfectly-defined-as thing, my ability to consistently produce creative work improved beyond measure.
(It's still something I keep present awareness about and sometimes find myself needing to re-cut)
3 - It's impossible for me to be happy unless ...
This prompt is a digging exercise.
It doesn't always reveal specifically the thing to cut, but it's a very good tool for identifying the lines to explore.
"It's not possible for me to be happy unless I get to write every day" ok well, why is that? and what is stopping me from writing every day?
(That example led me to #2, where cutting a need for a specific outcome revealed a way for me to write every day no matter what)
Again, I took these questions from the exercise in identifying your most immediate constraint. So if you aren't familiar with those conversations, I highly recommend listening to or reading the podcast episodes I shared above.
I do believe that these questions can help you identify something to cut which can bring you closer to seeing/hearing the happiness that is within you, which may be covered by all that which you are not and do not need in your life.
You can also of course explore Via Negativa7, as this entire idea stems off that concept.
This is possibly the most important tool in your toolbelt of being a human - remove.
Cut all that is not you.
Cut all that is blinding you to the happiness naturally inside.
Let it go.
Give it away.
Whatever you have to do, get rid of the things that are not you, not your natural state.
When you do, the happiness that’s already within you will start to reveal itself to you.
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
, CMO The Guardian Academy
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A brilliant blend of principles applied to one of the most fundamental concerns of the human animal, "What does it mean to be happy?"