« Satisfaction doesn’t come if we have what we want. »
The art and science of happiness
INSPIRED BY :
ARTHUR BROOKS
Harvard professor
author of
Build the Life You Want
1. THE 3 COMPONENTS OF HAPPINESS
Happiness is so much more than just a feeling.
It’s enjoyment, purpose, and satisfaction - it’s a combination of 3 things.
Enjoyment is taking pleasure and adding our humanity to it.
Taking it from our limbic system all the way to our prefrontal cortex.
It is more than a reward for something that happens automatically.
It’s experiencing things with people we love, things we can bring back to our memory.
Purpose is paradoxical and can be quite hard to find.
It’s this part of happiness where suffering is required.
People often find meaning in their challenges.
They find meaning in loss, grief, guilt, failures, heartbreaks.
Satisfaction is the joy for a job well done, a reward for hitting a goal.
It is difficult to master as we can’t keep it for long once it’s ours.
We’re satisfied when we graduate from university or retire after a long career,
when we marry the person we love, when we get the house of our dreams.
2. THE SATISFACTION PARADOX
But this satisfaction, no matter how important, eventually wears off.
No matter if we’ve been told it will last forever by our brain, nature, the world.
It’s a survival mechanism that helps us stay alive.
We need homeostasis, equilibrium, going back to our baseline.
Emotions can’t last or we would be too distracted.
We would not be able to prepare for whatever was to come next.
Our emotions need to go back down to a regular beat,
similarly to an elevated pulse rate after a session at the gym.
But nature also has a slightly nefarious purpose for us.
It is to make us think our satisfaction is going to last.
If we knew it wouldn’t, we’d stop and sit down altogether.
But we are still running, making progress, trying harder.
We’re running on a hedonic treadmill but stay more or less in the same place.
We do it for more pleasure, money, material possessions, for more power and fame.
But eventually the treadmill starts to turn up in speed :
we don’t run out of ambition anymore, we run out of fear.
3. HOW TO ACHIEVE STABLE AND LASTING SATISFACTION
Our happiness is up to us and up to us only.
Nature only cares about passing on our genes.
We can’t go with our instincts, '“do it if it feels good” is wrong.
But there is a lot we can do to achieve lasting and stable satisfaction.
Satisfaction comes from contravening our tendencies, not from having what we want.
it doesn’t come from managing, maximising, and expanding our haves.
It doesn’t come from having things, possessions, relationships,
it doesn’t come from having power, money, and all of these worldly things.
Satisfaction comes from what we have divided by what we want.
The point is wanting less rather than having more.
It is our wants not our haves we actually need to manage.
“We need to learn how to want what we have, not to have what we want.” - Dalai Lama
There is another conscious decision we can take to make our satisfaction increase.
Instead of having lists of things we want, we can have reverse bucket lists.
Lists of our sticky cravings and a plan to renounce those things.
“If we get them it’s great, if we don’t that’s okay,” is quite liberating to think.
3. THE IMPORTANT THINGS
It's not money, power, pleasure or fame that matter the most.
It has been shown to be faith, family, friends, and work.
Faith is a sense that can come from a walk in the forest or studying the ancient stoic masters,
from going back to the faith of our youth or from a meditation practice.
It’s a sense of the grandeur, of the transcendent,
a perspective that's bigger than our everyday life that is so small and so tedious.
Faith is something that zooms us out - whatever that is.
And then there are friends and family.
Family : ties that bind and that don’t break.
Friends : people we choose, people who are here to stay.
Work is where we earn our success, where we’re rewarded for our merit.
Where we’re serving other people with our endeavours, and have personal responsibility.
Whether we’re a college professor, an electrician, a politician or a bus driver,
work is what’s meaningful, it’s way beyond money and power.
4. IN SHORT
Have we been chasing the right things?
What are the things we need to want less ?
These are a few questions we can ask ourselves.
Happiness increases through enjoyment, purpose, and satisfaction,
and faith, family, friends and work make our lives truly meaningful.
The point is that the people we love and serve can enjoy what we provide.
When we bring satisfaction to others, this in turn brings more satisfaction to us.
by : antιdrastιc element
based on : Arthur Brook’s TEDx talk
The art and science of happiness
photo credιt : constudies.nd.edu