Subconsciously, you don’t want to be happy. Here’s why.
You are not happy because you don’t want to be. You don’t yet understand that is the case, but it is.
What is it that you and most of your peers are chasing after? Likely it is money, success, fame, prestige, or power. And why is it that you are chasing after those things? One reason: you think that once you have one or more of them, you will be happy.
Your real motivation is happiness. You are chasing all your goals today, hoping that you will be happy in the future. But will you?
The Truth
You don’t need any of those things to be happy.
Let’s take money as an example. Having money can solve money problems. It is hard to be happy if you don’t have enough to eat, a roof over your head, or live in an unsafe neighborhood.
Money can remove those obstacles and make it possible to be happy, but many people who have all those things are still dissatisfied. So they decide the solution to their problem is to get even more money, but money won’t make them happy.
Instead, the pursuit of more money keeps you from being happy. Let’s explore why.
You are training yourself to be unhappy.
You believe you must sacrifice your happiness today to acquire the things that will make you happy in the future. You give up being happy right now in the pursuit of more money, fame, or power in the false belief that once you have those things, then you will be satisfied.
But the truth of the matter is that you are training yourself to be unhappy.
You secretly distrust happiness. You believe that if you stop striving for more today, you won’t ever have enough to be happy in the future. You don’t let yourself be happy now out of fear that happiness will rob you of your relentless quest for more.
Why You Thwart Your Own Happiness
So you thwart your feelings of happiness out of fear that those feelings will cause you to stop striving for the more you believe you need to be happy.
Can you see how circular and wrong this reasoning is? You abstain from happiness because you fear it will keep you from doing what you think you need to do to earn happiness.
In the end, what you are doing is training yourself to be miserable. By turning away from opportunities for happiness today, you teach your future self to avoid happiness.
You are doing the opposite of preparing to be happy in the future. You are instead deliberately conditioning yourself to abstain from joy.
You’re not happy now and you won’t be in the future.
Your future self will not be happy because you have earned, saved, acquired, and garnered the admiration of others. Instead, your future self will be unsatisfied, not because you haven’t done enough to earn happiness, but because you have deliberately trained yourself to be dissatisfied with your life.
And why did you condition yourself to be unhappy? You did it out of the false belief that you needed to be unhappy to earn happiness.
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I guess it is.
Breaking the Wheel
What you need to do instead is to understand that your ideas about what you need to be happy are illusions. They are illusions propagated by society because they are helpful to society.
But what is good for society (economic growth, bigger GDP, more weapons in the arsenal) may not be what is good for you as an individual.
What is best for you is also good for society.
What is best for you is to become the optimal version of yourself. To become who you can be, you need to follow your unique path that builds on your skills and talent to hone your singular gift to the world.
You need to become the one person capable of doing the one thing you can do like no one else. You won’t discover what that is by abstaining from happiness.
To cultivate your unique talent, you need to do the things that make you come alive. You need to spend time doing the things you want to do regardless of whether or not you get paid for doing them. In short, you need to do what makes you happy.
You already know where your talents and interest intersect. It is the place you believe that all your hard work and sacrifice will take you to someday. It is the life you imagine in terms like, “When I’m rich then I will _______.”
The danger.
But here is the danger, if you sacrifice happiness now to get to a future place where you believe you will be happy, you will arrive in the future to find out you don’t know how to be happy.
The story of the disgruntled millionaire is a common trope, and it is a common trope for one reason, it is true. People like this think that when they have a million dollars, they will be happy, but they won’t.
It’s not that they couldn’t be satisfied with a million dollars. It is that they have trained themselves not to be happy. But they don’t recognize the illusion holding them back from the satisfaction that is eluding them. So they think, “Maybe I will be happy at two million dollars.” But again, they won’t.
You need to change your focus.
You won’t be happy until you stop focusing on the external rewards and focus on your internal experience. You won’t be satisfied until you start training yourself to be happy.
My Story
I have been there. I spent nine years training to be a surgeon, and I sacrificed so much in that time. I lost contact with friends, missed out on time with my spouse, delayed starting a family, couldn’t afford to travel, and got fat.
I was exhausted and miserable. Yet, I put myself through that awful experience out of the belief that my sacrificed happiness in the short term would be repaid with interest once I was a practicing surgeon earning the big buck.
But it wasn’t.
Instead, I found myself in practice believing I needed to continue to sacrifice and strain to get ahead, build a thriving practice and save money so I could be happy in the future.
All that overwork did not make me happy. Instead, a particularly grueling two weeks of work before a Caribbean vacation sent me to the sunny tropics with pneumonia.
I wasted an entire vacation with my family recuperating from an illness caused by overwork so that I could get healthy enough to return to more of the same.
Over more than a decade, I had forgotten how to be happy. Worse than that, I had trained myself to be miserable in the misguided belief that if I allowed myself to be happy, I would lose my drive to pursue more success.
But the reality was that my “success” wasn’t making me happy, and my future only held more of the same. No matter how successful I became, how big a house I owned, or how much money I had in investments, it would never be enough to make me happy.
If I wanted to be happy, I needed to stop sacrificing joy in the present for the false promise of greater happiness in the future. That was a fool’s bargain, and I needed to stop buying into it.
I made a deliberate change in my life. I stopped putting other people and their needs ahead of my own. I eventually lost 100 pounds, got fit, changed to a practice that offered less call and more time with my family (at a significant pay cut), and moved to a community where I could get back to nature and spend time hiking and skiing.
It wasn’t easy, but I trained myself to be happy, and just last night sitting with my family doing nothing special, I realized that I was content.
I have everything I need to be happy. I have enough, not because of how much I have, but because I have learned to appreciate what I have.
You are Your Own Worst Enemy
What is keeping you from happiness is yourself.
You have programmed yourself with society’s idea that you need to become rich, famous, and influential. But that is what society thinks is good for society.
What is good for society and you is to become the best person you can be and nurture your interest and talent until you have honed your gift to the world. You won’t be able to do that while you are miserable.
Abstaining from joy also means refraining from reaching your potential.
So How Do You Train Yourself to be Happy?
I’m not going to give you a list of ten things that will make you happier. The internet is already awash in lists like that, and to the best of my knowledge, they have not made a dent in the problem.
Instead, I want you to become aware of your predicament. Once you become aware, then you can take control. What you are unaware of controls you, but what you become aware of, you control.
Awareness
Monitor your reactions. Learning what brings you joy is essential, but it can be even more instructive to recognize what brings out your negative feelings. One early morning I was driving from the hospital to the clinic when I saw another doctor out on a stroll with his spouse on a warm, sunny morning, and it made me furious. I spent the rest of the short drive fuming at that lazy physician. “How dare he not be in the hospital every morning at 6:30 am,” I raged.
Of course, my reaction wasn’t to the fellow physician. My anger came from my desire to spend more time with my wife and children in the morning rather than running out the door while my family slept. In this case, my anger led me to a deeper awareness of the direction my life needed to move in.
Acceptance
Once you become aware, then you need to accept your new insight. I needed to accept my feeling upon seeing that other doctor doing what I wanted to do. My mistake was in jumping to judgment. Judgment clouds your perception and keeps you from seeing what is really there. You can’t understand what you judge, and you can’t change what you don’t understand.
Understanding
In the final phase, you will come to understand. Once you become aware of your thoughts and feeling rather than repressing or judging them, then you can understand them. And when you understand, then you can change. When you understand, it is difficult not to change. You don’t need to figure out a whole big plan because when you understand, you change on a fundamental level, and that foundational change will bloom into your life naturally and without effort on your part.
My Story Revisited
In my case, I shed the additional meetings and commitments that were keeping me from time with the people I love. And when that still wasn’t enough, I changed jobs to facilitate the life I felt compelled to live. I could not have found the courage to do that if I had not understood myself and what I needed to have a good life.
Conclusion
Only one person keeps you from being happy, and that person is you. Your own false beliefs about happiness and how to achieve it are holding you back from much more than being happy.
When you dispel those illusory beliefs, you will become aware of the ways you are your own worst enemy. Accept those insights and don’t shy away from the discomfort they bring.
Instead, accept those feeling without judgment. Once you become aware and accepting, then you can understand, and when you know, you will change.
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