The Reason We’re Unhappy
What if everything we learned about happiness is wrong?
The inspiration about this post came from an article I read which mentioned about the backward law from British writer and philosopher Alan Watts.
So what’s the Backward law? What can it tell us about Happiness?
Alan Watts says
When you try to stay on the surface of the water you sink. When you try to sink you float. When you hold your breath you lose it. Which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much-neglected saying “Who’s ever would save his soul shall lose it.”
You can apply that same thinking to our pursuit of happiness. The more we think about the things we don’t have, the more we remind ourselves that we don’t have them the more we chase happiness the more we remind ourselves that we aren’t. We are stuck in a paradox. The more energy we exert, the less we feel like we have these things and when we constantly tell ourselves that same story of poor old me, the poorer and older we will feel.
We’ve conditioned to believe that happiness is a destination. A place that will arrive at once we’ve checked off all the boxes of the ideal life and so we’re always on the pursuit, we’re always on the hunt. We’re chasing all the things we think we need. A job, a promotion, a significant other, a house.
Most of our time is spent purgatory of not having, because the moment we do get the thing that we’ve always wanted, there’s a fleeting moment of gratification. Maybe it’s a few days, a few weeks, or months if you’re lucky but that feeling goes away and you spend far more time wanting things.
When you think about it, these days most of these activities require hours of scrolling or thumb flicking, so we sit behind our screen chasing happiness whether on Tinder, Bumble, or Amazon. Going from one desire to the next. Always searching for the next thing that will finally allow us to be happy but we often forget about what happiness is.
For those of us who are fortunate enough to have our basic needs met, we have more agency than we realize. We have a choice. Psychologist and holocaust survivor Victor Frankl famously wrote in his book Man’s Search for a Meaning
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
If this can be true of someone going through the worst horrors is created by man why can it also be true of the little things that bother us. The traffic jams that frustrate us. We’re letting the fact that someone in your office got a promotion ruin our day but you don’t have let him get to you.
In that same book, the author wrote something strikingly close to Alan Watts backward’s law that it’s worth quoting at length. He wrote
Don’t aim at success, the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success like happiness can’t be pursued must ensue. Happiness must happen and the same holds for success. You have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscious commands you to do and go on and carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see in the long run, in the long run, I say! success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.
So the question is what can we do to change course?
How do we prevent ourselves from going down this path of constantly wanting more, constantly chasing after happiness to our detriment?
And the resolution comes through practicing two things regularly
- Gratitude
- Acceptance
Gratitude is what happens when you slow down enough to be thankful enough for the life you have.
As the artist Asher Roth once said
Happiness isn’t about getting what you want all the time, it’s about loving what you have.
When you take a few minutes each day to create the space to feel the gratitude for the things you have, you can transform your life. You’re no longer looking to the future for happiness, you’re feeling it right there at the moment. There are several tools that can help you from journaling to doing short 10-minute meditations each day.
Another way to change our mindset is to practice acceptance.
To accept the things in our life that aren’t going as planned especially the times that feel shitty that feels horrible that feel like the whole world is out to get us.
These are the moments where we need to practice and accept the fact that things aren’t quite what we want them to be but if we fight it they’re gonna be even worse. When we accept, we can start to let go, let it go from the past, and focus on the much fulfilling present.
Here’s is an experiment for you to try over the next week: For you to try next week, wear a rubber band on your wrist and any time you feel yourself thinking a negative thought or getting frustrated over things that are out of control in your life, pull back that rubber band and give it a little snap.
This can help you become more mindful of the times you’re not practicing patience. It can help you stop yourself from going down a negative spiral of emotions. You’ll snap out yourself back into reality.
At the core what we are trying to do is bring some stillness into our days where there would be otherwise just pure chaos inside of our minds. Speaking for myself, I know that I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t focus on self-growth and doing things that lead to a road of progress but this takes practice to make sure that my ambition doesn’t get in the way of own happiness.
It’s easy to lose sight of these ideas, one time revelations can be forgotten as we get swept up in an abundance of messages, social influences, and tinder dates. We forget these brilliant life-changing realizations.
So this idea might not be new. Might be something that you’ve heard before but if you’re anything like me. It’s worth repeating and going over this, again and again, to remind ourselves for the basic happiness we feel we have lost it and how to regain it. Or you can read Man’s Search for Meaning or you can check Alan Watts YouTube videos, both of them are tremendous resources for this idea.
Because no matter what, if there’s one takeaway from this article, I want you to constantly remind yourself that you have enough and you are enough.