My two cents on happiness

I was reading the article A Lazy Person’s Guide to Happiness and it made me think about my own perspective on happyness. What makes me happy? Im not sure that I have a set of rules or even a guideline about happyness. I have tought for a long time that inner peace was enough to be happy but now I’m hitting the +40 years old, it makes me rethink this. Inner peace is a slice of happyness but it’s not quite enough anymore. I wonder about leguacy and subtantial life experiences. The author of the article Hamblin argues that Buettner changed his perspective on life.

Few people bring the unique perspective to this mess of questions like Dan Buettner. Over the past 15 years, he has carved out a niche at National Geographic, where he travels the world in search of the healthiest people and “distills their lessons,” as he puts it, translating existential philosophy into practical information for limited-attention-span U.S. readers. The result has been a mix of journalism, academic epidemiology, advocacy, and entrepreneurship delivered in easy-to-implement bullet points. The mix allows Buettner a certain vantage to synthesize information and see it through to the real world.

Here it is.

Notable in the new pages are a shift from what started out as more traditional guru-type personal advice for longevity—drink a glass or two of wine after 5 o’clock with friends or food, eat a plant-based diet, maintain a bicycle, join a faith-based community, etc. Buettner hasn’t entirely given up on self-improvement, but he has come to believe it gets way too much emphasis. His focus now is improving our surroundings, for the same reason that “dieting” tends to fail but changing a food environment works.

It seems to me that not only having a group of people around me that truly makes me laugh might be a positive thing. How do I do this while being my introvert self?

You could work your butt off, pursue your purpose, become financially independent, and get there and realize “Oh, my life sucks.”

Now that’s something that I fear will never happen. With my wife and kids, things are just never sucking. It might be hard sometimes but definately not boring.

One facet of happiness is sum of positive emotions. So I like the idea of a “pride shrine”—a place in your house that you pass a lot where you put pictures that trigger pleasant memories. Or diplomas or awards that remind you of accomplishments.

That is something I will think about going forward is just this, proud shrine. In other words, a retrospective of what I have accomplished that makes me happy and from there I hope I’ll find a clearer path to what happyness means to me. More to come on this...