Happiness is a Verb - The Grass is Greener Where You Water it
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I think this is one of my best articles. Honestly, I’m finding it quite hard to summarise and cut out information.
Would highly recommend the full read!
Note from the future (22/10/2023): The pursuit of meaning is distinct from the pursuit of happiness. Check out this article. We should endeavour to not only ‘take’, but ‘give’ to find meaning and happiness.
“Our spirits are not trained to be satisfied by non-spiritual things.”
Yurui’s Summary
The Grass is Greener Where You Water It
The grass is greener where you water it. There’s always going to be work to be done, a box to tick, a hoop to jump through.
I used to dream of being where I am at the moment, but now I feel the nostalgia of growing up, and a desire to move into the future. “What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we're just squandering it?”
The past is dead, and the future will never come. The future is uncertain. It’s scary, but exciting. You can’t control where you end up at the end of the day – you just have to focus on the present.
I really can’t control where I am at this very moment. So it really is a choice; I can despise high school and live in resentment of where I am in life, or I can endeavour to make the most of the limited time that I have on this Earth.
The Choice of Happiness
Choosing happiness is so hard. We do all this work for ‘happiness’, but if we’re always in pursuit, we will never find it. Smell the flowers, and allow yourself to be happy while working towards your dreams. Enjoy the moment.
Happiness is a Verb
Happiness is a state of mind. A conscious choice.
Happiness depends on how you frame each moment of your day; learned optimism, reframing how you view life. Admiring everything that happens to you, falling in love with being alive.
Mindset. Of course, the micro, day-to-day moments make up your life in a macro sense. Conversely, once you sort out your macro mindset, the micro will fall into place.
A core value of happiness is gratitude. Acknowledging the small things and how they culminate to form our lives.
I think that happiness also relates with the butterfly effect. How I start my day determines how the rest of it plays out, even if I can’t control how the world works. Happiness is contagious.
Your environment influences you immensely, and can be your greatest asset or liability.
I’m grateful to have learnt how to be happier in my life, though I am still on the path to internalising this concept and applying it into every moment of my life. I’m going to do everyone who supports me proud.
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The Grass is Greener Where You Water it
May 14th, 2023
Sometimes, I wish that I could just have more intellectual freedom in high school. I keep telling myself that life will be good after the HSC (mind you, after a 6 hour study session on a Friday night), because I’ll be able to read, listen to podcasts, travel the world, work on what I want, and just relax. There are so many concepts I want to read about in the fields of philosophy and psychology, and quite a few projects I want to get cracking on. But for now, I’m lamenting my time in high school, and can’t bloody wait to get out. The grass will be greener on the other side.
But then, as I read the Almanack of Naval Ravikant (again!), I picked up on an incredibly thought-provoking quote: “What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we're just squandering it?” I shared this with my English tutor and he sent me an equally interesting quote: the grass is greener where you water it.
That’s the thing with competition: people will try to get ahead of each other by ticking boxes. Passion is the first thing to come off the list of priorities if it doesn’t contribute to my goals. Often, I think about doing things that I actually enjoy, but realise that they don't contribute to the next hoop that I need to jump through, so I say to myself that I'll do it after high school. And I will, for a bit of time. But then, I’ll have a new goal to pursue; the next internship, the next job, the next purchase. We say that the grass will be greener on the other side, but in reality, the grass is greener where we water it.
I tell myself that life will be good after I finish high school, but the reality is that University is going to be a world of pain as well, in its own right. A sudden surge of independence might give way to more freedom, which has the potential to not be beneficial, if I don’t control it. I’ve come to the conclusion that life will always be filled with good parts and bad parts, and that it’s up to us to savour it.
When I was a kid in primary school, I dreamed of going to the high school that I go to now. But now that I’m here in said high school, I often feel the nostalgia associated with growing up, and wish that I could go back. I’ve come to realise that our time and attention is our greatest asset. We cannot waste it. I was going to create this website after the HSC, because I would have more time then, and that my site would be of a higher quality at that time. But then I thought, “when I do end up creating this, will I regret not doing it earlier?” Finally, during the last school holidays, I decided to take action, put my heart into writing this stuff, and it’s been so rewarding.
I think the bottom line really is this – the future is uncertain. It’s scary, but also exciting. You really can’t control where you end up at the end of the day – you just have to focus on the present and the immediate future. Make the best decisions for yourself in the moment and worry about everything else later. Why worry about tomorrow when it will never come? Take it easy – one day, one hour, one minute, one second at a time.
I can’t control where I am at this very moment. So it really is a choice; I can despise high school and live in resentment of where I am in life, or I can endeavour to make the most of the limited time that I have on this Earth.
And I will always try to choose the latter.
Yurui
The Choice of Happiness
The hardest, and the easiest choice, is the choice of happiness. Today I realised that I do everything I do now for my own happiness, and the happiness of those around me. Happiness in the future. And then I realised that the Yurui of the past did everything he did for this current moment. Everything you have done in your life, everything that has happened in the past, has led to this very moment. There is no excuse to be unhappy right now. If you’re constantly working towards a happy future without enjoying the present, consider how the Yurui of the past would feel. He’d want you to be happy. The Yurui of the future would want you to continue to work towards happiness, but he’d also want you to savour the finite time you have alive and be happy right now. It really is the hardest choice to smell the flowers, but taking everything into context, it is the easiest choice.
The Yurui of the past would have done anything to be in your current position right now. How can you be unhappy about a reality that doesn’t even exist? Take life as it; the world will determine what will be in each chapter of your life, and you can only control what you can control. Let everything play out and live without regrets by controlling what you can to the best of your ability.
That is the hardest, and the easiest choice.
There is only anxiety about the future if we love the present. We wish to maintain the beauty of our lives right now, because it is so amazing; hence, we worry that it will change. We can only control what we can control, though. Sometimes all we can do is enjoy the moment.
We aren’t happy even when we are happy because of desire. Letting go is the path to true happiness. Buddhism, but with nuance; being happy is not mutually exclusive with growth and improvement.
Yurui
Happiness is a Verb
June 20th, 2023
I used to think that all this ‘happiness’ stuff was, to put it simply and crudely, bullshit. I thought that happiness was this ever elusive concept which we, as humans, will only ever see glimpses of. Happiness was some state of fulfilment that I’ll never reach, mostly because I have this desire to become a better person and change who I am. Discomfort with your current position is the main motivation behind self-improvement. Happiness, to me, was temporary and probably a bullshit buzzword.
But now I think that happiness is a state of mind. Happiness is a verb. It’s something that you can learn and train.
I also think that happiness is subjective. My problem with happiness in the context of ‘Nirvana’ is that a state of enlightenment is synonymous with a state of inaction. If you are constantly fulfilled and happy, you won’t want to change your life. I think that for me personally, happiness and self-improvement/ambition are not mutually exclusive. For me, happiness is a sense of fulfilment, satisfaction, and contentment alongside ‘the grind’. Feeling like if I could time-travel or teleport, that the place I’d choose to be is in the present moment, right here, right now. I usually feel it alongside my pursuit of self-improvement, chasing my dreams, not to mention, when I reflect on my journey and just feel grateful for the privilege I have in my life.
Something weird that I’ve realised is that the dopamine hit that I get from abstaining from an impulse (for example, scrolling on social media or eating chocolate) is often more powerful and stronger than if I were to indulge in my impulse. It’s some sense of superiority over the other voice in my head telling me to skip the gym or drink the Fanta. I become sort of proud of myself when I engage in this sort of self-control; it’s a sign that I’m shifting my mindset. Delayed gratification is a weird but powerful thing. You can find happiness while you’re ‘grinding’.
I’ve also realised that life is single player (I’ve written an article on this!), and that your happiness depends on how you frame each moment of your day. I think that happiness is a choice.
On a micro, day-to-day scale, I think learned optimism, and shifting your perspective on every mundane event, is the way to feel happier. In a way, reframing how you view everything.
This could be on the train, choosing to get off your phone, looking up, and admiring the beauty of the day. It’s choosing kindness and compassion over hate and envy whenever you interact with someone. It’s helping that random person out even if you’re not obliged to. If it’s a cold and miserable day, well, it’s only miserable if that’s how you perceive it, it’s thinking that you get the opportunity to wear that new hoodie of yours! It’s thinking that everything happens for a reason, and that train you missed might result in ten minutes that you get to catch your breath and admire the sunshine, instead of ten minutes wasted in spite.
Reframing how I view every moment is how I’ve been trying to find happiness. It’s a skill that your subconscious mind trains, and becomes stronger and stronger at if you mindfully train it.
On the macro scale, I think finding happiness is about how you view the world. Your mindset. Stoicism, forgiveness, orienting yourself around personal development, and treating work like a vector (this article!) is how I’ve been trying to internalise this. Of course, the micro, day-to-day moments make up your life in a macro sense. Conversely, once you sort out your macro mindset, the micro will fall into place.
A core value of happiness is gratitude. I’m also trying to acknowledge the small moments and how they culminate to form our lives. Really the basic things, like how I have an objectively high quality of life, how I have the opportunity to go to school, receive an education, have clothes on my back, a roof over my head, a full belly, and many many many many many more things. I am so privileged and often take too much in life for granted.
I think that happiness also relates with the butterfly effect. How I start my day determines how the rest of it plays out, even if I can’t control how the world works. Happiness is contagious. When you’re happy, smiling, and cracking jokes, the people around you will be happy as well. The happiness spreads. Whatever happens, every day of my life, I’m choosing to be grateful and happy.
Changes in how you see the world never happen overnight. Paradigm shifts are much more complicated than that, and I think I’ve narrowed it down to a few people/resources which taught me about learning happiness. I genuinely think that in order for meaningful change to occur, humans must learn and become aware of a concept, internalise it, and become obsessed with it. The concept is internalised through a long mental battle between your old paradigm of thinking and this new idea.
Your environment influences you immensely, and can be your greatest asset or liability. It’s definitely the people you surround yourself with and the content you consume that drives these new concepts. Shoutout to a book (The Almanack of Naval Ravikant), my first introduction to the concept of learning happiness; my mum, who always has my best interests in mind and often thought I was too realistic (and pessimistic); T, who has taught me first-hand how to find happiness within every moment of life.
I’m grateful to have learnt how to be happier in my life, though I am still on the path to internalising this concept and applying it into every moment of my life. I’m going to do everyone who supports me proud.
I promise I am going to do myself proud.
Yurui
