This blog is about happiness and freedom, and most days I am the happiest person in the room. This was not always the case. For most of us happiness is just a random state that we sometimes find ourselves experiencing, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Happiness is a skill and has components that can be cultivated and learned. We can get better at being happy.
For today’s post we will take a field trip over to another blog written by my friend Mr. 1500 over at 1500days.com.
You can read all about him here.
I stumbled upon his blog through a guest post he wrote about building an electric mountain bike (How freaking cool is that?). I started poking around his site and soon found myself a big fan of his writing. Mr. 1500 is a lot like me, just a guy looking for happiness and freedom, and along the way trying to inspire people with his story. He and I took a similar path in that we both sought early financial independence.
I met Mr. 1500 (virtually) a few months later when I asked if he would be willing to let me participate in his 10 Questions series where I could introduce myself to his readers. He was kind enough to allow me; you can read it here if you haven’t already.
Shortly afterwards we started chatting a bit and thought it would be really fun to collaborate. Head over and give my article a read.
How to be the Happiest Person in the Room
Feel free to leave a comment there or come back here if you like.
Guest posts are a cool way for me to reach new readers, and also an opportunity for me to send my awesome readers to other blogs I love. While you are visiting, give a few of Mr. 1500’s articles a read. Heck, you may even end up reading them all. To get you started here are a few of my favorites I think you will enjoy:
Four Phases of Financial Independence
If you are hitting this article via 1500days welcome to The Happy Philosopher! If you like what you see here please consider subscribing to the blog. I will send you an email when a new post comes out (currently about once a week). I hate spam almost as much as I love freedom and happiness so you will never get any spam from me!
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Yes, YES! YES!!! No, I’m not having an orgasm. I just really like this:
“Happiness is a skill and has components that can be cultivated and learned.”
I didn’t know that I could improve my happiness until very recently. I thought that I was condemned to my genetics.
Thanks so much for the wonderful post, advice and encouragement!
Haha, you win the award for the most enthusiastic comment. Thanks for letting me share my stuff with your readers.
🙂
A great message! You are becoming the Dalai Lama to the FIRE crowd. I think there is a restlessness in all of us that can be used to do good and elevate life or to cause feelings of envy and unhappiness. I think it’s important to try to use the restlessness for good purposes. Doing good for others can create great happiness as can gratitude.
I’m not sure I’m close to any kind of spiritual enlightenment at that level but I’m trying 😉
This might be your best post yet…at least for me. I actually had to bookmark just this post, because I know that I’m going to keep coming back to this, over, and over, and over. Sometimes we just need to be reminded that (a) we’re not the only one that struggles to find this, and (b) it takes hard work and practice.
Thanks for taking the time to write this. It’s effing brilliant.
A sincere thanks RTD. Each of my posts will have varying effects on depending on when they hit your brain. Sometimes we age just ready to hear or read something. This was an important and meaningful one for me and I’m glad you found such value.
🙂
Great post. I am not sure how I missed it the first time around. I might have been on vacation at the time and fell behind. Nonetheless, I plan to exercise my happiness muscles regularly.
I would agree especially with the statement:
“I’ve noticed the vast majority of the bad things in my life never actually happened. I’ve wasted years of my life worrying them, but they never happened. Either that or they did happen, but I wouldn’t have been able to predict or control them anyways.”
I have a similar expression (but different in many ways) that I have coined as The First Rule of Interventional Radiology and Everything Else:
“Things are almost never as bad or as good as they seem.”
It helps me modulate the extremes of emotion that may accompany good or bad circumstances or outcomes, in order to mitigate the euphoria or despair that may accompany them. Why mitigate euphoria, you might ask, in a blog about happiness? Should euphoria not be the ideal?
I think that euphoria (or intense happiness) is often predicated on unrealistic expectations, unsustainable conditions and faulty assumptions that lead to overconfidence, self-centeredness, karmic disturbance, and the high likelihood of overshooting in the other direction when circumstances and fortunes change (and they always do). Better to keep emotions rangebound and with practice and good luck, mostly on the positive side.
It’s tough to keep up with my blistering publishing schedule of barely 1 post a week 😉
“Things are almost never as bad or as good as they seem.” Haha, one of my partners loves that quote. It’s a good one.
We can’t be euphoric all the time, but we can mostly be happy and content. That’s where I aim. I drift, but always manage to pull myself back.