A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

I think this is entirely the point: How do you improve or change your environment so that it 'fits' you?

What does fit you? I hear many people say a certain level of salary would make them happy. Or that sportscar they always dreamt of. Just 5 more years of climbing the corporate ladder and then it's all wonderful from there. However, when you talk to them 5-10 years later, when some of them achieved those goals, they still do not seem to 'fit'; they have bigger and better goals now. Once they achieve those, they will be truly happy! It's a rat race.

My opinion, and since adopting it I see it everywhere, is that the outer does not change the inner, but rather it is the inner that changes the outer. Take, for example, this part of Jobs' famous Stanford Commencement Address: "[After being fired from Apple] I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me."

Notice what changes first; he did not start working on Pixar and NEXT from his feeling of failure nor from a need to change his environment to get his brainchild back. He changed his inner mental state first to accept reality, figure what is truly important, and follow his heart. The environment changed as a result. Once he saw the pure crushing failure of being fired from his own creation, as an positive opportunity to pursue the things he loved to do, it opened new paths unimagined by his negative self. The inner changed the outer.

Happy, for me, is a deep sense of belonging. It's about acceptance, perspective, creativity and finding interest and passion. The inside and outside will never disconnect; it's life, the one cannot exist without the other.

There is a lot of good to be said about having a strong internal locus of control, yet a lot of what people were saying in this thread seems a little like self-deception: you can't always be positive about everything. You can try and be happy and you can help this by following stoic principles like negative visualisation, reducing your desires and keeping internal goals instead of externals ones.

But this doesn't seem right. Your life is a story and it will have troughs as well as peaks. It's more honest to accept this and learn to experience everything that it offers fully. If somebody you love dies you should feel sad, and maybe you'll cry. There's nothing wrong with this.

I think there is great strength in allowing yourself to be vulnerable and accepting things as they happen. Do whatever you can to make life enjoyable for yourself but you're going to have to give a little!

Ugh. Pleeeeeeeeease just stop for a second, get your head out of your own head, and actually think for yourself about something. The way you say 'I love the internet' is just such a smug way of brushing off real criticism. This is not an example of 'Some crazy guy on the internet yelling at me for no reason'. The commenter just really in his first claim stated some things, though perhaps a little harsh(the post really was just about happiness, so its a little strange to berate him for making a happiness-centric post when that was the point), was just there to show how his personal opinion differed from how you had(or had not...) actually thought about the quotes. However, there is no excuse for your first reply. Honestly, can you go read what you wrote and justify anything you said?

"Thanks a lot for your comment, disagreement males you question your assumptions and strengthens your understanding of the issue." - Why would you write this? What is the point of writing this statement? No really, pleeeeeeease, stop working on whatever you are doing, and for your own benefit. Put down Flow. Put down your code. Read this, and figure out really what you mean here. Why would you respond with such a condescending sentence to someone who actually read what you said and wrote very really 'personal' arguments against it?

Is there a body of research that supports your counter-claims? I'd love to read anything you can point me to - Same trick again here, go ahead and read this line again, but there is a part 2 to this task. You now need to go read the commenters post. I feel he makes it very very clear in his words and in his tone that all his objections are his just his own thoughts and opinions on the subject. To be honest, I feel like an idiot explaining this to you, but I feel I need to because if I don't you may ask me if I have any 'evidence' to back up my claims. Honestly, please go read that again and if you can justify why you said those words, please reply with them. Please.

Finally, I'm sorry to say all this, and sorry to repeat some of the commeters criticism, but I was just so irritated reading this. As naive and show offy as your blog post was, the kind of behavior shown in your response is 10000X as intolerable, and is just too common with people with that sense of false intellectualism in Silicon Valley. The arrogance and condescension and just lack of respect youve shown creates dividers in people that don't need to exist, and really just decreases everyone's happiness.

Very cool! The drop down for year/month is way better.