Greg Proffit Writing

Tag: happiness

  • Master of the Obvious News – What You Look At Determines What You See

    In my post Look What’s In Your Hand, I encourage the reader to acknowledge the simple fact of having made it through every day right up to the present. That is not a simple feat. Nor is it one that deserves to be shrugged off and taken for granted. It is not a throw-away piece of knowledge. It is a simple exercise to show that we miss truths we’re not looking for.

    One way to think of life is as a daily search for clues revealing how we should feel about things. But life rigged the search. It will reveal the evidence you’re looking for. It will confirm your biases, whether good or bad. What you look for determines what you see. Optimists don’t need rose colored glasses. They are looking for things to feel good about, and they see them. Pessimists look for evidence to confirm their frustrations, disappointments, and skepticism, and they find the evidence. Problems are incredibly easy to spot. A child can do it.

    A wiser man than I once said, ”You don’t see the world the way it is, you see it the way you are.”

    Unknown…

    To see a different world requires a different you. 

    Do not despair, this is not an impossibility. However, seeing the good in the world around you is an acquired skill. It takes a commitment to look for the good and to recognize it when you see it. It doesn’t take any particular skill or talent to see all the problems in the world. Mastering the ability to see the good all around you is one of the most worthwhile pursuits of life. It is indispensable to a good life because a prerequisite for having one is the ability to see what is good about it. 

    No one who is habitually focused on the problems and deficits of their circumstances, or of the world in general, is living a good life, no matter how much money they make, what car they drive, or any other external factor.

    Every person chooses whether to be happy or not.  The decision is made alongside the determination to look for and see the good, or not. Some make the choice on the front-end and evaluate their circumstances based on that choice. They know that what you look for will determine what you see. For these, even when bad things happen, they haven’t neglected to also spot the good, the recognition of which acts as a defensive buffer for their mind and emotions. 

    Others make the happiness choice on the back end, allowing circumstances to dictate the choice for whether they will be happy or not. And people waiting for circumstances to be exactly as they want them to be before they can be happy never are.  

  • The Enemy is Me

    One of my favorite quotes is from Walt Kelly, creator of the Pogo comic strip. On the first observance of Earth Day in 1970, he did a comic that ended with this quote:

    We have met the Enemy and He is Us

    I love this for its simple, elegant, truth.

    I am proposing a modification for your consideration:

    I have met the Enemy and He is Me

    I am certainly my own worst enemy. I don’t need a government or a political party to blame for the shortcomings and failures in my life. I don’t need to look any farther than my own face in the mirror. 

    My hunch is that you and I are the same in that regard. If there is something in your life that you aren’t happy with, it’s almost a certainty the government didn’t do it to you. 

    It’s a remote possibility that someone besides yourself is to blame. But my experience has been that even when I’ve been let down and hurt by someone else, I put myself in that position by over-investing in that account. I expected a return they just couldn’t give…even if they had wanted to.

    I don’t expect anyone in this world to make me happy. That’s a God-sized job. And the biggest impediment in His way is me. If I am unhappy, there is no doubt that somewhere along the chain of cause and effect, I have done the lion’s share of contributing to that feeling. 

    Of course, I am beyond grateful for those people and circumstances that enrich my life and contribute to my satisfaction, contentment, and joy, but I don’t expect them to reach the place in my mind that only I can go. I get to decide what kind of person to be. 

    Good people, the best people, make me want to be my best version. But they have no power to make me become the best version. That’s on me.

  • Happy Place

    “Daddy, how much longer ’til we get there???”

    Henry David Thoreau famously said, 

    “That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.”

    Thoreau had economics in mind, but I think his aphorism is equally applicable to emotional riches.

    Consider the common phrase, ”Happy Place”.

    As in, I’m going to my happy place, or I’m at my happy place.

    I looked it up. This phrase first appeared in the 1990’s in the Ottawa Citizen. But it really didn’t become part of the vernacular until the mid-2000’s.

    Now, this phrase permeates the jargon of even those who fancy themselves to be ”mindful”, or see themselves as ”aware”, or as practicing ”zen”.

    I have a question for you. If you claim to have a happy place, or there’s only one place where you can feel happy, what does that make all other places?

    I understand and agree with the idea of having a ”mental” or ”psychic” happy place as a state of mind in which one practices reflective gratitude and meditative calm. A mental sanctuary that can calm the nerves, and that feels restorative is a healthy mental space to carve out.

    Even the Urban Dictionary definition of ”Happy Place” is ”a place in your mind that is all happy.”

    But if someone needs a physical place to go in order to feel these things, they’re missing the point, right?

    In that case, I’m calling bullshit.

    Now, granted, there are places you can visit that come with beauty and other amenities that aren’t the norm. But most of those places ain’t cheap. So, I’ll refer you back to Henry above.

  • Happiness Equations

    Someone once said this about goals,

    ”Aim at nothing and you will be sure to hit it.”

    That’s a paraphrase from my memory. I did not look it up for attribution. 

    The quote makes a good point. If you don’t have a goal in mind, a destination to reach, then any result will do. All outcomes are equally good if you haven’t bothered to select a specific outcome.

    In practice, satisfaction in life is measured by how well we are doing at meeting implicit expectations. There is a mathematical formula that is descriptive of this phenomenon:

    Happiness = Reality – Expectations

    If true (and my experience has proven to me at least that it is), a  thoughtful look reveals that the only part of that equation in your direct control is the Expectations part. The more accepting you are of however Reality unfolds, without imposing any particular expectations on its unfolding, other than the expectation that it will unfold, the happier you will be.

    Can we reconfigure the equation to get any different outcome? Let’s try. By the magic of algebra, solving for Reality, we have:

    Reality = – Expectations – Happiness

    This equation posits that Reality unfolds regardless of either your expectations or feelings about it.

    And then we can also solve for Expectations, and we get:

    Expectations = Reality – Happiness

    This final look shows that Expectations are True (in the sense of accurate) when you accept what Is ( how Reality unfolds) and disregard how it makes you feel.

    So, no matter how we slice it, you can guarantee un-Happiness by expecting to be Happy.

    Happiness then, is a poor goal for one who expects it. The rejection of the expectation of Happiness as irrational is the surest way to experience it in Reality. You’re welcome.