(Note: These are excerpts from a book I recently read called "The Rudest Book Ever" by Shwetabh Gangwar. As the title of this book suggests, the language used in it is pretty crude and I have tried to tone it down. However, you'll find some traces of it, for I didn't want to take away the essence of the text and the author's expression.)
Are you Happy? ask yourself. To be honest,this isn't a very hard question.
But if I ask ‘Do you feel satisfied with your life?’, your mind will look for the answer either elsewhere or someplace deeper than where happiness resides.
I may feel happy, but I don’t know if I am satisfied. It’s a question that makes people really pause for a moment and think: Hmm, never really asked myself that.
Your major struggle in life is to be happy; it is not to be satisfied. Now, self-satisfaction does not mean you won’t be happy, nor does it mean that you will be happy all the time. What it offers is something better—a state of mind called peacefulness.
WHY DO WE CHASE AFTER HAPPINESS LIKE JUNKIES?
The honest answer is because it feels good.
The truth is, life doesn’t revolve around happiness. Life is a lot of things that have nothing to do with happiness. But we think it does, because happiness feels absolutely great. . So, whatever makes you happy, whatever makes you feel good, is what you want. And whatever doesn’t, you don’t care about them anymore.
We are happiness-junkies. People have left long, stable relationships or cheated on their partners because they met someone new who excites them—that’s how much of a happiness-junkie people can be.
The problem with responding more to "feeling good" is that chances are you may become a person who just focuses on feelings rather than thinking.
And thinking is the only thing that will ensure you don’t mess up your life.
Ideally, an intelligent person would be more thinking-based than feeling-based.
Feeling-based sounds something like: This makes me feel good, therefore this is good. I want it.
Thinking-based sounds like: Just because something makes me feel good doesn’t mean it’s good. I will think about if I really want it.
A feeling based person is implusive, excitable, lacks a thoughtful process , doesn’t take the future into consideration, and is therefore easily defeated by their own feelings and easily manipulated by those who can create nice feelings in them.
A thinking-based person considers stability, the future, the information at hand, and the fact that feelings change all the time. Feelings are unreliable as hell!
Two reasons why most of us remain feeling-based happiness junkies are:
Nobody tells us this: Life is a lot of things that have nothing to do with happiness, but if you do them right, the result is going to be
happiness.
In short, happiness is a by-product of life done right. And I hope this does not come as a surprise, but doing things right requires
thinking, a lot of it.
The more you chase after feeling good, the more your ass is going to be kicked by life because, in doing so, you ignore all those important things you need to do.
You do experience short bursts of pleasure whenever you are having fun in your teen years and twenties. It works quite well up until you are forced to realize the distinction between momentary and long-term happiness. The realization comes after years of failed attempts to try and stretch those momentary pleasures into long-lasting ones. This could very well be in your thirties. Do you know what this means? That, even as an adult you continue chasing after a definition of happiness and a list of what makes you happy which you came up with when you were a kid.
Why? Because it made that kid happy, you think the same will continue working with an adult too.
Well, this goes to show that most people are simply children who have aged.
.
The act of comparing yourself
The act of comparing yourself has its basis in nothing but simple observation. A comparison could be triggered by seeing anything and anybody. It could be as vague as comparing yourself to a celebrity, a person you have met for the first time, or a person you have only heard about from others. From that, you conclude: They are better than me. How dumb is that?
It is not a comparison of data as much as it is of your perception of them. It is you drowning in sorrow because you have assumed they have something that you don’t, and that something would make you happy.
These assumptions exist only because you have no idea what would make your ‘self’ happy.
We keep prioritizing it because we are convinced that happiness is what we want from life and that it is the ultimate answer. In doing so, we tend to de-prioritize most things that have nothing to do with happiness. They could be your self-respect, conscience, morality, rational thinking, common sense, logic and self-betterment.
I am pretty sure that, right now, you would choose the other things as they sound sensible. But, in life, it is not possible as long as you are convinced that happiness is the final goal. You have to chuck that thought out of your mind.
You have to say, F* happiness. I don’t want to be happy, I want to be satisfied in life. I want self-satisfaction.
(Note: You might not agree with these excerpts which is perfectly fine, but these insights from the book, do make you "think". I would love to hear your point of view on the same!)
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