I’ve told myself this often throughout my life. I’ll get promoted, and then I’ll be happy. I just need to get more money, and then I’ll be happy. I’ll retire, and then I’ll be happy. To be sure, some of these things have brought me joy. But never in the amount that I’d hoped. Whenever I’d accomplish one of my big goals, I wanted to revel in the success for years. I wanted the joy of success to last, but it quickly faded into normalcy. When I compare the amount of time I spent working towards my major goals, to the amount of time I spent enjoying them, each victory feels overpriced instead of satisfying.
Then what causes me to be happy?
If I had a better grasp of that, couldn’t I find an easier way to achieve it? Looking back, I tend to be happy when I’m focused and working towards a specific, meaningful goal with people that I’m close to. I also need to be free from worry, and boredom. Whenever these conditions are met, I am happy. But that leaves a lot of open questions. What makes a goal meaningful? And how do I keep myself free of worry or monotony?
What makes a goal meaningful?
There is no objective criteria for determining what is meaningful. Things that are meaningful to me, might be drudgery for someone else. Since goals are intrinsic, they are meaningful if I feel that they are worthwhile. I need to believe that I’m working towards something that will be worth all of the effort that I’m putting into it. And how do I convince myself that something is meaningful (or not)? It depends on what I say to myself about the task. What benefits will I, or others get from it? Does is server a greater purpose?
What causes worry?
A situation that causes one person to worry, might not affect me. In school, whenever I took a test, some people would be nervous, but not me. However, when we got our scores back, I would be tense and jittery, while others were relaxed (or resigned). What was the difference? Worry is mulling the consequences of failure over and over. I can free myself from it, by telling myself that it’s ok to fail, and that I can weather the consequences of failure.
What makes a task boring?
What makes a task boring? I’ve played video games, and enjoyed them. The actions that I took for each level were remarkably similar to the last. And yet, I did not find them monotonous. Why was that? There were relatively minor changes between each level. But I noticed them, and marked the progress between each one keenly. So, a task is monotonous if I tell myself that I’m doing the same thing over and over, instead of noticing the differences between tasks and the progress that I’m making.
What about you?
My happiness is derived from what I tell myself. What do you need to be happy? What are you telling yourself?