I’ve been thinking about unhappiness...

Impediments to Happiness: Wanting Things to Be Different00:00

I've been thinking about impediments to happiness and can see two obvious roadblocks. First is wanting things to be different. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or plan something. If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change occurs. Sometimes this is an actual change you need to make: leave an unhappy relationship, change from an unfulfilling career, complete a difficult conversation. We often remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain.

Second Roadblock: Uncertainty00:32

Second roadblock to happiness is uncertainty. Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears. If you feel like you can't predict the future, you default to fear, worry, rumination, and your mindscape eclipses reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy, which is way worse than what could happen in reality. This imagined nightmare briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. Humans abhor not knowing how the future will unfold. We would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable.

Overlapping Situations01:30

Sometimes these situations overlap:

• A family member gets an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them.