At last we’re seeing a sensible look of what you don’t need to be happy.
As pop-psychologists in Porsches everywhere have finally twigged, no one’s happy all the time and you can make yourself wretched trying to get all your life-ducks in a row and achieve the emotional equivalent of the unicorn: constant bliss.
Maybe Buddhist monks can get there, so go your hardest and don the robes if that’ll blow your hair back.
For the rest of us, chances are that, like Hoges painting the Harbour Bridge, when you get your happiness stars to align and it all feels “complete”, something starts cracking or flaking as soon as you’ve put the finishing touches on that last bit.
There’s been a backlash against the Big Happiness industry in the past few years as people realise they’re being parted from their cash for yet another self-help book, course or vibrational-breath healing retreat for not much lasting result.
The secret is out that The Secret didn’t work.
Sure there might be a temporary glow from “taking steps” to make happiness happen, like buying a book that teaches you how to “manifest”, but I’m not convinced that’s not the same rush of blood to the head that you get when you spend money you know you really shouldn’t but want to, “because you’re worth it”.
We’re finally getting a look of what you don’t need to be happy.
It’s still tempting to glance through lists of “How to be Happy in Six Steps or Less”, “Five Ways to Manufacture Happiness”, “The 15 Habits of Incredibly Happy People” or “10 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Incredibly Happy”. But if any strategy was a guaranteed winner then why does a Google search on “how to be happy” produce 293 million pages of articles in 0.43 of a second?
Even though I know this, I dialled back the happy-guru burnout when I spied a list by the Texan blog Marc and Angel Hack Life sliding past on Facebook. They called it “9 Things You Do NOT Need to be Happy”, which promised to be short and easy.
“To be happy we need much less than we think we need,” writes Marc, followed by a list including what appears to be some good common sense. You don’t need ideal circumstances (rather “a certain set of attitudes”), or everyone’s approval to be happy.
“The biggest prison you will likely ever live in is your fear of what other people think,” he writes. That has bumper sticker written all over it.
Happiness, Marc says, does not require a perfect past and “just because your past didn’t turn out like you had hoped doesn’t mean your future can’t be better than you envisioned”.
His line that “most of the time the only difference between long-term happiness and long-term despair is not quitting on yourself” was very encouraging, even if there were no scientific references quoted.
To be happy you don’t need “full control over life’s constant changes”, he says, “the best thing you can do is to let go of what you can’t control, and invest your energy in the things you can”. I’d buy that.
You can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes.
You don’t need “a carefree, stress-free life” because “great challenges make life interesting, overcoming them makes life meaningful”.
Neither do you need “all the things you don’t have”: “Happiness is valuing what you have, and enjoying the people, places, objects and events in your life for what they are.
It’s not about changing and achieving all the time; sometimes it’s about being and appreciating.”
Marc says you don’t need “a mountain of money either”, and there’s scientific backing on that.
I recall research that found once you hit about $75,000 in income, money has lifted your authentic happiness levels about as much as it’s going to (more isn’t necessarily more).
And you don’t need “any event happening in another time and place”, which means not “wishing your moments away or ruining today by focusing on another time or place”.
Marc correctly points out that you don’t need “constant happiness … you can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes”.
Now look, so far, so believable and, yes, so sensible.
Maybe there really are professional-amateur psychologists who, if we just follow the links on their websites and buy the books they have written, really will transform our lives to a state more perpetually sunny than we ever dare dreamt.
Maybe, as Marc writes, all you need to do is know what you don’t need and instead “live simply, love generously, speak truthfully, breathe deeply, do your best, and leave the rest to the powers above you”.
And I did click the link, and it took me to a shop for their book 1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently. Seriously, 1000 things?
Nup. If there’s one thing I know it’s that I don’t need that.
Source: Wendy Tuohy
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/wendy-tuohy/happiness-industry-backlash-prompts-look-at-what-you-dont-need/news-story/d33291c3ab50d1b0dc9138a64ddfbffb
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