yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Rant: The TRUTH about happiness


3m read
·Nov 7, 2024

I'm just going to rant a little bit about happiness because it seems like a lot of people are very hung up about buying a certain thing, achieving a certain level of success, achieving a certain level of wealth.

So many materialistic things that they think will bring them happiness. I'm going to share my thoughts about this: materialistic things are very much like a drug. It's like heroin. Buy that expensive thing; it will give you happiness, but it's a fleeting happiness. It's a happiness that goes away after a while, and then you have to seek something else to bring you back to that level of happiness.

For instance, for me, when I got my first Lotus, it was an insane amount of happiness. I was so excited about achieving this thing and buying something that I wanted for so long. I'm not going to lie; I was a 10 out of 10 in terms of happiness for a while.

Then something happened. After about a month or so, I was almost depressed, believe it or not. I thought, "Now what? I've got this thing, and now what? What's left?" It's very much like that with almost anything in life. Even with the house I bought last year, I was super excited to get this house, and then a few months later, it's just like, "Well, now what? I already have it. Now what left is there?"

I've noticed, too, that you basically just return to whatever your baseline is after a few weeks, maybe a month. You get something you're really excited about, you achieve something, you do something special, and your happiness elevates. Then over time, you just slowly return to baseline anyway.

Except the negative is that now you've already achieved this certain thing, so to achieve that same level of happiness, you need to achieve more than that. You almost build up a tolerance to what it is that you're doing.

What I found that actually gives you a lot of happiness are two things. One is just being content and being really grateful for everything you have in your life. If you think you're not rich enough, I guarantee just go to a poor area, and trust me, you will feel rich. There will always be someone who has more than you. There will always be someone who's better looking, who has more money, who has more success.

So you can never win in that game of having more because there will always be somebody that has more. But what I found, for me, that gives me a lot of happiness is actually doing something versus waiting for something to happen.

It's the process of doing something that brings you more happiness than getting the thing itself. For me, it was the process of getting a Lotus that brought me more happiness long-term than getting the Lotus itself. That makes sense?

So if you're someone who's not entirely happy or satisfied in life for whatever reason, it doesn't matter why, you will find more happiness in the process of achieving your goals than actually achieving that goal. As weird as that sounds, it's something that I found to be entirely true for me.

Maybe it's not. Maybe for you guys, like buying that house will make you so happy and like you won't regret it. But for me, it's like when you achieve a certain point of material success, where I could, within reason, you know, buy a lot of the things that I would want that would make me happy, I know that long-term, it's just going to be like a few weeks of like a heroin high, and then I'm just going to go back to what it's like normally.

So anyway, that's my rant about happiness and life, and yeah.

More Articles

View All
Scenes From Nigeria’s Baby Boom | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
Foreign when I first got this assignment, I think my first thought was, “Oh no, how am I going to do this?” Yagazi Amazi is a Nigerian photographer and a National Geographic Explorer. Last year, Nat Geo asked her to photograph Nigeria’s population, which…
Wires, cables, and WiFi | Internet 101 | Computer Science | Khan Academy
My name is Tess Winlock. I’m a software engineer at Google. Here’s a question: how does a picture, text message, or email get sent from one device to another? It isn’t magic; it’s the internet, a tangible physical system that was made to move information.…
Identifying key features of exponential functions | Algebra 1 (TX TEKS) | Khan Academy
We’re told to consider the exponential function f where f of x is equal to 3 * 12 to the power of x. Now they ask us several questions about the y-intercept of f, the common ratio of f, and what is the equation of the asymptote of f. So pause this video a…
Stare decisis and precedent in the Supreme Court | US government and civics | Khan Academy
As we’ve talked about in many videos, the United States Supreme Court has a very different role than the executive or the legislative branches. The executive branch, of course, runs the government. The legislative branch, they make the laws and set the bu…
Matter and energy in food webs | Middle school biology | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to talk about food webs, which is really just a way of picturing how all of the matter and how all of the energy flows inside of an ecosystem. Now, when I talk about matter, I’m talking about the atoms in an ecosystem, the molec…
Shadow Work | Owning Your Dark Side (feat. Emerald)
We have not understood yet that the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization. Carl Jung. Human civilization consists of countless traditions, codes of conduct, and s…