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
Radical functions differentiation | Derivative rules | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
Let’s see if we can take the derivative with respect to (x) of the fourth root of (x^3 + 4x^2 + 7). At first, you might say, “All right, how do I take the derivative of a fourth root of something?” It looks like I have a composite function; I’m taking the…
How I made $73,000 by waiting 90 minutes in Real Estate
What’s up, you guys? It’s Graham here. So, gonna be sharing with you guys exactly how I made over seventy-three thousand dollars just by having the patience to wait 90 minutes. This is going to be something that will apply to anybody in any sort of custom…
The Power of Thinking For Yourself
On the 23rd of March 2016, Microsoft released a new chat bot named Tay on Twitter. Described by Microsoft as an experiment in conversational understanding, Tay was built to have conversations with people through tweets and DMs. With the slaying of the int…
The Biggest Mistakes First-Time Founders Make - Michael Seibel
Here are some of the biggest mistakes first-time founders make when starting their company and in the first year afterwards. First, I often see founders choosing to solve a problem that they actually don’t care about. Well, this mistake isn’t fatal, and …
What Truly Matters To A Stoic
Hello everyone and welcome! This is the seventh edition already of the Einzelgänger Q&A. A while ago, I got a question from a follower named Sofia, below my video about Stoicism and not giving a… you know what. This particular video is about caring le…
Michael Burry's BIG Bet On Inflation (The Big Short 2.0?)
Well, earlier in the week, we did a deep dive into Michael Burry’s put option position against Tesla. But that wasn’t even the biggest takeaway from Cyan Asset Management’s 13F filing this quarter. The most alarming thing you find when you read between th…