In the pursuit of happiness, we often find ourselves navigating through a labyrinth of emotions, experiences, and desires. What truly constitutes happiness, though? Is it merely a product of external circumstances, or does it delve deeper into our genetics, environment, and spiritual beliefs?
In this article, we embark on a journey to dissect the multifaceted nature of happiness, analyzing its various aspects and offering insights into its three foundational pillars: memory, momentary experiences, and metaphysical fulfillment. Through this exploration, we aim to shed light on the pathways toward a more profound understanding and attainment of genuine happiness. So, join me and read on!
The Aspects Of Happiness
Happiness has a genetic aspect, it’s very genetic. It’s not situational and you can’t fix all your genes. Think of it like a glass of water, some people have a really huge glass, and that’s your genes. Many people think that when they achieve something, they’ll be happy because they are depressed now. There’s some truth to that and some of that is not true.
For instance, there’s some interesting scientific research on people who had a horrible accident and became paralyzed. Of course, their happiness massively goes down for a certain amount of time, but eventually, they kind of become the same level of happiness they were a year before they had the accident that paralyzed them. On the other hand, there are people who get it all, they have health, wealth, love, and kids, and they are still depressed and commit suicide.
There’s also an environmental aspect to happiness. Some people want to be happy no matter what, and some people are going to struggle with happiness. Your job as a human being who has free will is to try to maximize your potential.
Three Foundations Of Happiness
There are many ways you can break down happiness. Let’s break it down into the three Ms. There’s memory happiness, momentary happiness, and metaphysical happiness.
Daniel Kahneman who won a Nobel Prize is one of the most respected psychologists, scientists, and economists. According to him, you divide a great part of happiness into two sections. Memories, that’s your long-term happiness, all the things that happened in the past, and there’s momentary happiness that’s like you right now, how you feel in the present moment. For instance, if somebody is poking you with a needle, your momentary happiness is going to plummet because you’re in pain right now.
Then there’s metaphysical happiness. That’s the things that are bigger than us. We need meaning in our life, that’s bigger than us, even if you’re an atheist. Metaphysical happiness is like all the things we don’t quite understand, like questioning what is our purpose in life.
Now let’s go through these three foundations of happiness.
Memory Happiness
You must live your life in such a way that you can look back. Take a short time frame, not even memories from 30 years ago. Let’s say the average human’s recollection is the best for one to 10 years, so you need to be operating your life from that frame.
Ask yourself, how will I feel about this, what will be the difference between 1 and 10 or even 5 years from now? Will I go, oh yeah, thank God I did that when I could.
This is why you should get healthy because if you don’t maximize your physical health, one day you’ll look back and say, wow I had the chance I was at the peak of my time and I let that go past.
The same with love. If you want to create wealth and you think that you can’t make time for family and love, it is totally false, it’s not true at all.
There’s a focus on memories that’s why one of the best uses for wealth and money is traveling with family and friends because you’re building memories. Even if you spend a lot of money, you’ll never really regret it because you’ve had some of your best memories and you’ll have no regrets about spending that money.
You’ve got to be active to create happiness and you need to focus on that. Just use the 5-year time frame, it also helps you focus yourself on wealth.
If you’re spending all the money you make, no matter how much money you earn on a cash flow basis, if you just spend it all it’s not right. But if you do it from the memory standpoint and you’ll spend correctly, that’s different. If you make your first million, you’ll be thinking, what do I do with it? Let’s build some memories!
The memory happiness is 1/3 of your happiness. In general, your best memories are those that entail the social side, maybe being with friends and family, so you need to optimize toward memories.
Momentary Happiness
It is a tricky one because this one in great part also entails your genes. You need to know your ancestors. In many religions, people go and worship their ancestors, and that respect and reverence even if you don’t think about the religious spiritual side is a good idea because you are the culmination of those sets of genes, so it’s good to know.
Do your DNA, you will know a lot about your happiness. So if you find out about your grandparents on both sides and there’s a lot of things like depression, you need to be more aware of that because those things pass through the genes. Although it’s not 100% heritable like height, hair color, or IQ. Things like narcissism are highly heritable, too. If you have a narcissistic grandparent, you’re much more likely to have inherited some of this. Know your ancestors because this will help you understand your momentary happiness.
You have this kind of baseline and people always revert to their baseline. Baseline 1 to 10, you’re like a five of natural happiness, some of that is genetics and some of it is environmental.
So let’s say your genetic index is a five, that’s where you sit naturally without doing any therapy. You are driving in LA on the freeway and some crazy guy cuts you off, yells at you, and screams. You’ll roll down like almost all people. You will have an instant reaction in your body, you’ll have a spike of cortisol and you’ll have varying hormonal processes kicking in. The difference is the reversion to the mean. The average person who gets cut off, let’s say they’re five of their momentary baseline, they spike down in happiness to a two. But some people only stay there for 10 seconds and then bounce back to their natural state of happiness, whereas some people stay down at two for a longer time. That’s this momentary happiness. It is normal, just like they say to air, it’s normal to revert quickly to baseline happiness.
That’s the skill you want to build. How do you move back to baseline quicker? You can use techniques like meditation to bump you up a little bit to become happier, maybe from a five move to a seven of natural baseline.
But if you’re based on a five, it’s going to be hard. It’s just like some people are going to have muscular bodies after they go to the gym. Everybody looks healthier after they exercise and eat healthy, but some people get amazing results and some people just get average, and that’s okay. There has to be a large variability among humans, so not all humans are going to have the same baseline of momentary happiness.
You need to believe it, and being conscious of the fact that you need to revert will make you better at it. So next time somebody annoys you and you’re naturally five on happiness and it pops you down to two, do a little process. Let me be mad for a while but then, let me get back to normal.
Have an agreement with yourself, don’t take things personally, that is very important.
The happiness comes from realizing that about 90% of the time things are personal. Someone yells at you because they’re having a bad day, they can’t even see who you are. Somebody rejects you on Tinder, they don’t even know you. So move on, don’t sweat the small stuff.
If you do that consistently, it gets easier and easier. The first time your momentary happiness is affected by some small thing and you can’t get back to normal, give yourself a break, you’re a five of happiness that day. Someone annoys you and doesn’t even know you, so you move to a two, that’s okay. But try to get back to a three or four quickly, because you’ll build that mental habit and eventually it’ll be like a child’s play.
The average person is probably going to take two to three months. It’s just like changing your diet or changing habits, it’s tough because your body will crave sugar. If you’re broke, the broke mindset will stick and try to pull you back in. Revert back, just focus on getting it back so that you eventually go off the baseline for no more than 5 to 10 minutes.
Some people try to achieve more happiness by losing sensitivity and that’s dangerous. Sensitivity in the brain and emotions to your environment exist for a functionally adaptive healthy purpose, but in a modern world where we’re overstimulated and there are too many people around us, it’s easy to overreact. That’s like a second alarm system, like anxiety, which affects your momentary happiness, and that’s usually negative. It’s natural for people who are more sensitive to really feel pain but that’s okay, just get off, let it hit, and then come back if you can. Do that as it is going to skyrocket your momentary happiness.
Metaphysical Happiness
It is tied in pretty much with momentary happiness. Let’s break it down into three aspects – nature, spirituality, and being charitable.
If you’re somebody who has high anxiety, is a sensitive person, and gets affected, go back more to nature. Don’t live in the middle of a big city like New York City or Los Angeles. You’re not going to be able to get back if you were like a five and then somebody’s yelling at you and you go back to two of happiness. But then you learn from this lesson and try to get back to a five fast, but then you keep getting overly stimulated, so it doesn’t work.
You need to be around nature. This creates happiness, meaning if you live in a place where there are trees, grass, and water, your cortisol levels (which is your stress hormone) go down and you become happier. So try to align yourself with nature. For example, in New York City rich people live around Central Park where they can see nature all the time.
So get more nature in your life! If you live in a big city, once or twice a month, get out and go to nature. If you have a cat, get a fish, a dog, or a bird. Have multiple species, we are built to interact with multiple species. If you have a beach home, have a mountain home. Or just go camping. Take your shoes off, connect your feet to the dirt. That’s nature. That’s the metaphysical side that will help your momentary happiness and your life overall, to achieve the good life. These are hugely important. Get out and don’t make any excuses, but vary it up too so it’s not always the beach, you’re not always in the mountains, are not always camping. You need to see this variety.
Now let’s talk about spirituality. I think it’s hard to know for sure what happens after death, but even the most conservative Catholic or Muslim person changes with the times. Nobody’s exactly like they were 1,000 years ago. Spirituality changes with the times and as we learn new things. For instance, 500 years ago when lightning went off, we didn’t know what that was and we thought it was God was mad at us. No matter if you’re a fundamentalist, Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, you must understand that spirituality is adaptive, just like the universe that we live in.
If you’ve been wondering what’s the purpose of anything, find something that gives you that purpose. Be a little more ambitious than the average person.
Humans are like the grass, like flowers, we’re coming up but that’s actually where our metaphysical happiness comes from. The second you think you are the special one, you now put too much pressure on yourself. It’s like, oh my God I have to be this, but you and I are a cog in the machine and all spiritual religions and even atheism confirms this particular belief. So stop thinking that you are special and the world needs you. The world can use you and you can give to the world, but you ain’t needed and neither am I. Work hard in the machine, there’s been many Albert Einstein’s that would have been needed by this world, but they died young or in war or accident, and we’re still here and we’re okay, so don’t put that pressure on yourself.
The last part is happiness as metaphysical charity. Being charitable and giving money to others is great. But it’s important to build wealth first so you can give some money away. But you don’t have to give it all away, be balanced, it’s not the purpose. We aren’t more spiritual if we give all our money away.
You must be a person who strikes a balance in your charity, both financially and time-wise. For instance, once a month give up your time and go to a retirement home, it’s a lonely place for the elderly. Volunteer to help orphans and widows in their distress, the helpless, or the animals in shelters. That’s a spiritual thing and this has to do with this metaphysical, spiritual happiness. You need to think less about yourself and think more about others who are in need. Also, if you’re wealthy enough and can afford it, give 10% of what you make to charity.
Sometimes it’s also good to cleanse yourself from material things like cars or phones. It will come back around even better. So, start taking action today – just start something, anything…! But when you don’t know what to do in your life, there is always time to prioritize.
Now I’ll leave you with a question. So think, what is the one thing you’re immediately going to start doing in the next 5 minutes that will make you happy?