If I could show you the path to happiness and the path to becoming a millionaire, which would you choose? Did you think they were one and the same? Indeed, they are not.
Bob Odenkirk said the path to becoming a millionaire is clearer than the path to happiness. Yet, most people are financially on the brink. If that were me, that state would undermine my happiness.
“And of course most people think being a millionaire makes you happy. But just go talk to a millionaire.”
Some people would say that you just don’t know how to spend it.
I was dating a guy who told me that he wouldn’t marry me unless I was a millionaire. No such thing as an ironclad pre-nup; iron rusts. With perfect logic, I set out for my million.
Actually, I was already on this mission because someone told me that if you have a million dollars, you can retire. I heard of baseball players getting contracts, and I thought, if that were me, I would work for one year and then retire happy. I couldn’t understand the lure of more.
More always comes with a cost. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted enough to offset those costs.
I fell for the man, and I accepted his life. I accepted his offer to move in with him, with my million in the bank. (Not in the actual bank; I’m financially astute.)
I was a happy millionaire. And then the happiness started to fade. Three years in, I was a miserable millionaire.
But now, I am back to being a happy millionaire. Happiness depends on knowing who you are, what you need, and getting those needs met.
Knowing Your Needs
Odenkirk describes that there are people who need a certain level of fame. If you think you need billions to be happy, you might need the attention and acceptance of a huge number of people.
You have to get to the root of your needs. Needs aren’t stagnant. They also aren’t necessarily something you achieve, check off, and never pursue again. You might have to do it daily, like sleeping; you might have to do it multiple times a day, like eating.
My path to happiness recognized that it was up to me to make it happen. I was an adult fully in control of my life and the choices within it. The choice is always to ratchet down what you will accept and tolerate in your life, or change.
We change when we realize the pain of staying is worse than the pain of going. It’s the moment you realize the truth is worse than what you were measuring, and the fear is smaller than you anticipated.
Odenkirk goes on to elaborate. “Security, comfort is not happiness.” Of course, it helps, but “it’s just not as much comfort as you think it’s going to be.”
That relationship might have been security and comfort. But as the comfort factor dwindled into more chores, higher expectations, and investments that would be difficult to recoup, security became a jail.
What happens when security is taken to the limit? Maximum security? It’s a prison of solitary confinement. It’s being alone in your mind, thinking you have to accept your situation, and it’s wonderful at producing reasons because you are smart, creative, and you’ve been doing this a long time.
What if you didn’t trust your thoughts?
For me, that’s what my experience with suicidal ideation taught me.
Ignoring Shitty Thinking
My brain is capable of some shitty thinking. AI gets it wrong about twice in every thirty-minute conversation we have. Sometimes those mistakes are purely addition! If AI can screw up that easily and that often, my brain can do much worse, I’m sure of it.
I’m so sure of it that I don’t bother thinking much anymore. I used to think all the time, talking to myself to sort out my experiences as I lived them, or reflecting on past experiences, or anticipating new ones. Looking back, it’s so laughable, but I trusted that narration and processing.
It’s responsible for my pattern of making the same mistakes over and over while thinking I was making new ones. In truth, I was in a long, slow spiral, completely obvious in hindsight.
All I wanted was complete autonomy. It took retirement to get it. Fully in control of my time and how I spend it. Complete liberation. That’s the nature of my happiness. It’s not everyone’s, but I am loving my hermit mode to create without criticism and live without control. It’s my bliss.
Yours might be pride in something, but I learned to connect pride to my ego, long ago, and learned that my ego will never be satisfied. It will always want more. More what? I asked up close, unwilling to waver until I got the answer.
Most people waver. They can’t take a mere second of silence, and they start spilling answers. Their assumptions, and you will get to see the nature of their shitty thinking.
When you notice it, ask yourself if you do it too. Not if, when.
No one is immune from the biology of our brains.
Knowing Basic Architecture
One thing we all share is the architecture of our brains. Steeped in that architecture is the reason for the irrationality. We all feel in one part of the brain and label it in a different, separate part.
Because of the design of our brains, emotions create decisions up to seven seconds before you are aware you have decided. When we gather evidence, we find what we want to find, even if we have to swim through the truth to find it.
With this lag and these mechanisms in place, science estimates that 80-99% of all our decisions are unconscious and automatic. We repeat patterns and become predictable while thinking we are living, growing and improving.
With so many of our decisions being unconscious and automatic, people are like programs. Running the same habits, going through the same motions, we are on repeat in our everyday lives.
Our programs are built through two sources: our natural shared programming and our individual experiences. Part of our shared programming is our ability to ignore the truth. We all do this individually, with varying levels of creativity and ability. Discomfort becomes denial.
But brave souls know science doesn’t care whether you believe it.
Change your perception when you realize there are many other ways to look at it, not just the one explanation that you’ve come up with. People who hold differing beliefs may be perfectly logical and rational individuals. If you are stuck on your own, ask someone how they might see it.
Someone else’s perception might hold the key to unlocking your reality, identifying your shitty thinking, discovering your needs, and illuminating your path to being happy.
Why defend something that’s making you miserable? Follow that person instead of telling them why they can’t. Clearly, they are.
Building Supportive Environments
The environment around you has a larger impact on you than you may realize. What is the environment? It is the space around you and everything in it. It’s as big as the community and culture, and it’s as small as colour and design.
More and more, researchers are discovering that it’s not character that determines your behaviour; it’s conditions. Designers and marketers use it to get you hooked. We click where we are supposed to, and react like well-trained dogs when notifications buzz. With tangible currency out of the transaction equation, we rack up credit bills like we never have to pay them.
In one shocking experiment, conditions turned university students into behaving like seasoned prison guards and prisoners. The shocking part was how swiftly and surely it happened. So quickly, so completely that the experiment was terminated early.
You can use your external environment to support your goals, or it can undermine them with little effort. Mastering your environment is eliminating the random behaviour it otherwise produces. You want to be the wizard of your world, not the pinball. Or at least, have your own hands on the paddles.
Environmental influences have such huge effects on you because they trigger your moods. What are moods? Unresolved memories with emotional impacts. They are feelings we’ve held on to long after the chemical has dissipated.
We keep going back to them for some reason. A reason known only to you. If you find yourself distracted, unable to focus, or knowingly fixated on something that didn’t work out as you wanted, the best thing you can do is sit down with yourself and have a conversation. You would do it with a friend, and sometimes you need to be your own best friend.
Your Own Best Friend
Only you know when you are spin-doctoring, avoiding, or otherwise hiding from the truth. Hiding from YOUR truth.
Change the environment, change the results, and it starts with realizing two powerful options you have at your disposal: your environment and everything in it, and your moods and what you want to feel.
Moods help maintain our current perceptions, solidify our personalities and give us a feeling of familiarity in this constantly changing world. What mood are you in, and what old experience is it rooted in?
Your best friend would sit you down and ask you a lot of questions. Listen without judgment. Hold space for your tender emotions. They might even help you name it to tame it.
Identifying emotions helps minimize them – no longer are they the scary monsters in the dark, but they now have definition. One you can look up in the dictionary, and everyone knows what it means.
Ah yes, betrayal. That hurts. Grief, a different hurt. Heartache, a broken heart, it hurts so much my lungs get caught up, and I am heaving and crying too.
Your best friend would rub your back. Maybe even hold you tightly.
Do you know what you want to feel? The way you are designed, you aren’t creating what you want to feel; you are creating what feels familiar.
It might not even feel good.
If you want to feel good, then choose it. Why are you choosing pain and punishment? Who told you that’s what you deserve? Are you truly serving up justice, or would an apology work better?
Go ahead and get addicted to moods that serve you better: enthusiasm, love, joy, curiosity, and engagement. Pursue them strategically and without apology or explanation.
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