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
Emily Weiss on the Insights That Grew Glossier - With Amy Buechler at the Female Founders Conference
I am Aimee Beger from Y Combinator, and I have the distinct pleasure of introducing Emily Weiss here. Thank you so much for joining us. Emily: Thank you for having me! So, did you see everybody? So, Emily, you founded two brands that have a pretty beaut…
Gnarly in Pink: These Skateboarding Girls Shred With the Boys | Short Film Showcase
Kang-cook, sure! I don’t date anymore. I’m using a speckles messed up. Well, I got a lot without putting my nails little, saying I’m gonna use glitter. I mean, I’m her blue purple a skater, so I could use that. This is purple. Yeah, next! Our next, I wan…
The 10 Trillion Parameter AI Model With 300 IQ
If O1 is this magical, what does it actually mean for Founders and Builders? One argument is it’s bad for Builders because maybe O1 is just so powerful that OpenAI will just capture all the value. You mean they’re going to capture a light cone of all futu…
Estimating decimal addition (thousandths) | Adding decimals | Grade 5 (TX TEKS) | Khan Academy
So we have two questions here, but don’t stress out. Anytime I even see a lot of decimals, I’m like, okay, is this going to be a lot of hairy arithmetic? But what we see here, it does not say what 8.37 + 4926 is equal to. The equal sign is squiggly. That …
Rational equations intro | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy
[Instructor] Let’s say we wanna solve the following equation for x. We have x plus one over nine minus x is equal to 2⁄3. Pause this video and see if you can try this before we work through it together. All right, now let’s work through this together. N…
Article IV of the Constitution | US government and civics | Khan Academy
Hey, this is Kim from Khan Academy, and today I’m learning about Article 4 of the U.S. Constitution. Article 4 lays out the nuts and bolts of how federalism—the system of shared governance between states and the federal government—works in practice. Artic…