Tag: purpose

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self-improvement

305 – Q & A: Friendship, Religion, Purpose, and Arguments

305 - Q & A: Friendship, Religion, Purpose, and Arguments cover

Transcript:

Hello friends, my name is Erick Cloward and welcome to the Stoic Coffee Break. The Stoic Coffee Break is a weekly podcast where I take aspects of Stoicism and do my best to break them down to the most important points. I share my thoughts on Stoic philosophy and share my experiences, both my successes and my failures, and hope that you can learn something from them all within the space of a coffee break.

So this week's episode is another Q & A episode, and part of the reason behind that was because I came down with COVID last week and it completely wiped me out. I didn't even get a podcast episode out because I was just absolutely exhausted and had so much congestion and phlegm that my voice was, was all kind of scratchy and raw.

And so, I'm feeling a bit better this week. Still feel under the weather. I took a test yesterday and it still came up pretty positive. So hopefully I'm on the mend. I feel like I am, but yeah, this is my first time having COVID. I've been pretty lucky of avoiding that so far. But I knew the odds were not in my favor that I would stay forever free from COVID.

So this one doesn't seem as bad as what other people had. And I seem to be recovering fairly well. So let's get on with today's episode. So a number of these questions I got from listeners from different comments. One of my listeners I had a conversation with yesterday over Zoom. And I just wanted to kind of pick a few questions that people have posted on social media.

If you have any questions about Stoic philosophy that you would like me to answer, you can find this video on YouTube and post a comment underneath and I will use one of your questions in my upcoming Q& A episodes or you can just find me on social media and respond to one of my posts and ask a question, send me a DM, whatever you like.

So, let's get on with the questions for today. So, the first question that, that I kind of want to address, it was more of a comment that was on one of my previous episodes where I talked about friendship. And somebody had mentioned, you know, well, who has time for friendship? You know, as if it's a luxury to have friendship.

And I responded back trying to be direct, but not, not, not trying to be rude, but simply just saying, well, you have time for it. It is your choice what you do with your time. And if you want to, if you don't want to spend that on friendship, that, that's really your choice. But I think that, you know, It's probably kind of a bigger thing in that we do have very busy lives.

But with that, we also spend a lot of time doing things by ourselves that we could do with other people. That we could spend time with them instead of watching Netflix or, you know, scrolling endlessly on our phone. What if rather than, you know, sitting around at lunch on your phone, you called up a friend and said, Hey, let's go grab some lunch.

Or, you know, After work, you know, you meet up for drinks somewhere. There's always time for friendship. And friendship is one of the most important things that we need to have in our lives. They've shown through different studies that the more friends you have over your lifetime, the close friendships that you have, the longer you live.

So, I was watching a podcast, it was a Diary of a CEO, which has become one of my favorite ones with Stephen Bartlett. And he was interviewing Simon Sinek, and they were talking a lot about friendship. And he gave some really good advice on that. And one of the most important things that happens to us is that we don't make time for our friends, oftentimes because we don't feel like we're that close to our friends.

And, you know, we want to have close friendships. But the best way to have close friendships is to be a great friend. And I think that's something that's really missing in this. You know, it's, it's, everybody thinks that friendship is hard to do, and having close friends is hard to do, but we're all starved for friendship.

So I really think that, think about what you would like for, a friend, what you would like in a friend, and try to be that for somebody else. And a lot of it is just being authentically you, and finding people that you can be yourself around. But go out there, make that effort, because friendship is what makes life great.

And if you don't have time for friends, then you really need to make time, because you are, if you are too busy to have friends, then I think the priorities in your life are probably a little bit skewed, and maybe you're spending too much time at work, or on things that you know that aren't inclusive of other people.

Next question. Can you be stoic and be religious? Yes, plain, plainly put. Yes, you can be stoic and you can be religious. Stoicism is not a religion. Stoicism is a set of principles. It's a philosophy. It's a way to live your life in such a way that really can be adaptable to almost any religion if you want.

And stoics themselves had a theology and as I've been working on my book, I've, I've learned a bit more about this and they have this idea, that there was a great creative and animating force within the universe that kind of managed all of the circumstances of our lives. And it's called the Logos. And this is what created the universe and what kind of keeps, you know, the stars moving.

It is what creates the events that happen in our lives. And the idea behind the Logos is that it's deterministic. It has a big plan for what is happening in the world, that everything that happens, happens for a reason. But within that, you have free will to make choices with the deterministic things that come your way.

So when life circumstances happen, when events happen, natural disasters, whatever you want to consider circumstances and events, you have free will within that realm to be able to make choices about what you want to do to respond to those things. You may not be able to control them, but you can decide how you want to respond to them.

And for me, I'm not a religious person anymore, and like I said, I've talked about it many times on my podcast that I grew up Mormon and found that it just didn't fit me. I found that there were just a lot of things in religion that simply weren't true because the founder of the church made a lot of things up.

And so for me, it was, it was challenging leaving that because I've been taught my whole life. This is the truth. And this is how the way, you know, this is how life works, and that God would punish me if I, if I left the church. But I found that, for me, it didn't really jive with the type of person that I wanted to be.

And so, I don't practice any particular religious faith. Do I believe in a God? I'm not sure. I would say that I'm agnostic at this point. I don't have any proof that there, that there is a God, but there are so many unanswered questions in the cosmos that I, I'm simply withholding judgment until I have better information.

And so I can kind of follow along with the idea of the Logos with the Stoics because there is something. I mean, the fact that we have matter versus not having matter you know, the fact that life tends to build towards creation, even though there is also entropy, meaning that things over time lose, lose energy and decay.

So there's this interesting balance of, well, why does life naturally self-organize and come into creation? How do, how do we have consciousness? What makes consciousness? There's so many questions that I don't know and don't understand, but believing in something larger than myself, that there is some type of creative force within universe is something that, that I think I could be okay with.

But, from what I've seen, and having grown up very religious, and not being it, stoicism doesn't really conflict with any religion. It's about being a good person no matter what. And its core principles are the core principles of many of the world's religions. So, for me, I don't see them as being in conflict at all.

So, yes, in my opinion, you can be religious and be stoic.

All right. Next question. How do I find my purpose in life? Now, this is, this is always a hard thing, and I, I think that young people probably struggle with this the most, but I think even people my age struggle with it. That's something that I've been working on, and I've been, as I've been working on changing my career into becoming an executive coach, it's something that I think we're constantly doing throughout our lives, and we should be doing throughout our lives, is what is our purpose?

And I think that it's going to change over time. But I think that there's this feeling that people feel like that once they discover their purpose, then they'll know what to do with their life. And they will be able to just head towards that, that one goal, and they will be happy. But the thing is, is it doesn't really work that way.

At least in my opinion, I think that part of your purpose in life is to find the things in life that bring value to your life, that you want to do. So there's nothing wrong with setting out in a direction to try and figure out what that is. In fact, that's part of the whole journey, is to discover what your purpose is.

And I know it's frustrating because you want somebody to, you know, just give you a test, or to come up to you and have a conversation with you and tell you, You know what? This is what you should do with your life. And that, for me, kind of robs you of the experience and the exploration and the discovery process of getting in there and figuring out what it is that really works for you.

And sometimes you'll be surprised. Sometimes you may do something where you have some type of aptitude and find that you hate doing that. You might be great at math, but you don't want to be a math professor or you don't want to program computers because it's, it's not anything that is exciting for you. It doesn't, it doesn't get you excited about doing anything, but sitting down and being a therapist, you know, might be the thing that does it for you.

So don't be afraid to go out and try and discover this because there's not a real process, at least I don't see it, That you just follow steps A, B, C, and D, and voila, you know what your purpose is in life. Part of it is to go out and actually discover that purpose. And I know that that's probably not what you want to hear, but I think that if you don't allow yourself the time, the space, the opportunities to go out and discover what it is that you want to do, and to try a whole bunch of different things, Then you're kind of shortchanging yourself of the experience of life.

Because again, you'll never know where things will turn up for you. I mean, for me, I studied marketing when I was in college. I was planning on being in marketing and when I was getting my degree, but I worked in tech while I was in college because it was an easy job and I figured I could learn about computers.

And when I went to find a job after I was getting my degree, nobody would hire me in marketing because I had no experience. So I was like, okay, what do I do? I, well, I've been working in tech a little bit. I know how to build some web pages. So I looked for a tech job and I had a job within two weeks. So I decided I would try that path for a while.

And that ended up being my career. I had no idea before that. I mean, when I, like I said, when I graduated from college, I was just planning on getting into marketing. And when I started college, I was a musical theater major, but I was kind of afraid that I wouldn't be able to make it in that. I didn't have the self confidence to be able to pursue that as a career.

And so, which is why I turned to marketing and now after creating this podcast, you know, I I'm turning into a coach and creating courses and doing my best to help other people in a way that, that is very outside the world of being a software developer or a CTO that I'd done for the last 25 years. So you never know where life is going to take you.

So just really, it's about being open and exploring.

All right. Last question. This was a question that one of my listeners, Christine we had a conversation yesterday over Zoom and she's dealing with some, some tough situations at work. And mostly again, the most problems that you find in in work and at home are relationship problems.

So they're dealing with other people and how do you deal with them better? And her question was, how do you deal with hardships with a sense of rationality instead of anger? And again, in regards to dealing with other people. And I did a few, an episode a couple of weeks ago I think about anger. And I talked about why, why I used to be so angry all the time and how I really have worked hard on overcoming that so this will be a little bit of a rehash on that. But in our conversation when we were talking about this we also had you know kind of came up some ideas on our own.

So I wanted to share this with you probably one of the most important things you can do and this is what the Stoics teach us is focus on when you are in a tough situation on living according to virtue. That you really lean into your principles and in any situation you need to ask yourself, Am I acting with wisdom with this person?

Am I treating them well? Am I being courageous and saying what needs to be said? Am I practicing temperance? Am I practicing self discipline and not, not allowing myself to get inflamed by this other person? And the Stoics talk about you know, looking at things as objectively as possible. And when we're in an angry situation like that, it is incredibly hard not to let the emotions that the other person is feeling trigger our emotions.

And so the more that we can practice that objectivity, and a lot of this is, it takes time to practice that. It takes time of thinking about that, and in a way, kind of rehearsing in your mind how you would deal with those situations. So the Stoics have a practice called Premeditatio Malorum, which is that you imagine the worst possible scenarios so that when they do arise that they're much easier to deal with because you've already prepared for them.

If you, I mean, I know this may sound bad, but if you can imagine the worst thing that could happen when you're having an argument with another person, you know, what is the worst thing that they could say? And how would you respond to that? And if you, if you are able to kind of think through those things and rehearse those things, then when they actually say those things, you know what to do about that, rather than, you know, taking offense at what the other person said. And this is again where that objectivity comes in because you can only be offended if you choose to be offended. Meaning when somebody says something to you, if you broke it down to just purely objective, you know, like the Stoics like to do of breaking things down to their purely constituent components, like the smallest thing.

When somebody says something to you, it simply sounds coming out of their throat. It's the interpretation in your mind that you have, that is creating the emotion that you feel about it. It's that story that you feel. And this is something that's hard for a lot of people to understand. They just think that emotions are something that just happen to you.

But emotions are a result of the thoughts that you have in your head. And if you don't believe me, that emotions are a result of the thoughts in your head. Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say that you had a friend in high school that you were very close to, and you hadn't talked to this friend in 10 years and, but you, you were super close to them before, but you just kind of lost touch and five years ago they died, but you didn't hear about it.

And so after 10 years, you finally hear that this person had died. And you are heartbroken, and you feel upset, you feel sad, you feel that kind of grief. But the thing is, is if emotions were simply caused by the events outside of us, then when your friend died, you should have immediately felt sad, you should have grieved, all of those kind of things.

It wasn't until you found out about it, and you had thoughts about it, you had a story that was going on in your head about your friend who died, that created the emotions in your body. And so every emotion that you feel, besides the, just the core visceral emotions, like, you know, if, if a car is coming towards you, there's, it's more of an instinctual motion, emotion.

But emotions are caused by the thoughts in our head. And so, by making sure that you know what is going on in your head when you're in an argument. What are you thinking? What are you interpreting from the other person? And what are you thinking about that other person? During this argument and if you can start to be more aware of your thoughts about it, then you can actually make some changes on that.

And one thing that Simon Sinek did he gave this really cool exercise about how one time he was fighting with his partner and they were both, you know saying well you did this and you did that and they were you know, laying out facts but they were fighting emotionally, and finally he had the wherewithal to kind of say stop and say wait, you know what, we're just throwing these things at each other and you're, you're spending all this time telling me where I'm wrong and you're right and I'm doing the same thing to you, why don't we switch that up?

I will tell you everything that you are doing right and everything that I am doing wrong. And by flipping the situation, it allowed them to kind of, recognize some of the thoughts and things that were going on in their heads about each other, and by flipping it to where they were only allowed to say what the other person was saying that was correct, then it really diffused the whole situation.

So that, that's one exercise to get to the, the nitty gritty of what you're actually arguing about, and to make the other person feel heard. Because what you're doing is you're saying, this is what you said, and this is right. This is what I said, and this is, this was wrong. And by, and he said that after he had done that in, in one certain situation, it was like five minutes later, they were laughing and, and really having a good discussion about that, because he was willing to take a moment, be objective, and recognize that this situation wasn't working well and wasn't good for either of them.

So that stoic objectivity of being able to take a step back, try and look at the situation as objectively as possible, and choose a course of action rather than simply being reactive. It's probably one of the best things that you can do, and this is why meditation, this is why constantly thinking about stoic ideas, journaling about these ideas, and again, practicing that kind of premeditatio malorum.

What would you say, or how would you feel if this other person you were arguing with said something really mean and nasty to you? Could you give yourself kind of an objective break and not take what they said personally? By practicing those types of things, I think that those really help you to move forward in making sure that you can turn the situation around, and not be so argumentative with this other person and maybe end up having a much closer and more productive relationship.

So that's the end of this week's Stoic Coffee Break. As always, be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and thanks for listening. I also wanted to mention if you're not following me on social media, I would appreciate it if you would do so.

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Categories
Purpose

285 – Ambition or Contentment

285 - Ambition or Contentment cover

One of the key aspects of stoicism is to be content with what we have. So how does this balance with ambition? If you are content, does that mean that you shouldn’t be striving to accomplish your goals? Today I want to talk about how stoicism can help you accomplish your goals while still finding contentment in your daily life.

"The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."

— Seneca

One question that I get from time to time is how do balance ambition with the stoic teaching of contentment? Meaning, if we’re supposed to be content with how our life is and accept it for exactly what it is, how do you work hard and achieve the goals you want to accomplish in your life?

This is an interesting paradox to consider, because it seems like they are in opposition of one another. If you are content with what you have, does that mean that you become apathetic? If you are striving to accomplish your goals, does that mean that you are discontent with what you have?

Contentment

"Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens."

— Epictetus

First, let’s dig into the definitions for each of these things. What does it mean to be content? Does it mean that you simply accept life as it is? Does it mean that you’re docile and just let life happen?

Often people think that contentment means that we are happy with life as it is and don’t want things to change. But that’s the thing, life will change. As soon as we are content with life as it is at a particular moment, things change. We can’t just be content with life as it is in one static moment because that moment will not last. We need to learn to be content with life as an ever changing process. We need to learn to flow with life as it comes.

Contentment comes from an acceptance and appreciation of what is, of all things in your life whether you consider them positive or negative.

Finding contentment means that we accept life and all its changes and recognize that we have the power to choose how we want to view the events that happen. It means that you choose your perspective and outlook and you don’t let external events and circumstances be the driver of your mood.

Ambition

“Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.”

— Marcus Aurelius

Now let’s talk about ambition. Let’s go with the definition that ambition means that you have specific goals that you are striving to accomplish. It could be that you want excel in your career or you are trying to master a skill. Maybe you want to improve yourself in some way. Does mean that you aren’t content with the way things are?

Where ambition leads to discontent is when we become dependent on the outcome. When we set our happiness upon achieving our goal is where we find the conflict with stoicism. The problem is not that you are discontent with the way things are and are trying to change them. The problem is when we focus on the outcome of our striving, then we set ourselves up for several kinds of unhappiness.

The first is that when we set our happiness on achieving the goal, then it is likely that we won’t be happy while we are striving for our goals because it is still out of our reach. We have decided that we can’t be happy until we get what we want, and you’ve given away your control. You’ve placed your sense of well being outside of yourself. Since the stoics remind us to focus on what you can control, you can only control your perspective and the choices that you make in the present moment.

Another pitfall of setting our happiness on the outcome is what happens if we fail to reach our goal? What if we give it everything we have and still fail? If your happiness is outcome dependent then you are allowing your happiness be dependent on something outside of your control.

Another problem with being dependent on the outcome is that when we actually achieve our goal, then we are often happy for a time, but then we find that happiness fades. Our level of happiness fades to the level it was before we achieved our goal. This is known as the hedonic treadmill. We work hard to get the bonus or the new house only to find that after a while we are just as happy or unhappy as we were before.

Process

"Don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will—then your life will flow well."

— Epictetus

So how do avoid the pitfalls of striving for our ambitions? How do we find contentment without becoming complacent?

When we learn to focus on the process of what we are doing, then we are able to find contentment in it. We work on being happy with our growth and how we are doing something rather than just achieving something. We find joy in learning how to master something. We find contentment in our own improvement, know matter how small.

What about external validation? Again, if we are intrinsically motivated, if we are motivated by our comparison with ourselves rather than needing the validation of others, then we can find contentment. The only person we should competing with is ourselves. Are we better than we were yesterday? Have we made progress?

Now does this mean that if we ignore external validation and comparisons that we’ll achieve our goals?

No.

You could still work really hard on something, enjoy the process, and still not get what you want. But what you will have is control over your happiness. It will not be as dependent on what others think.

The outcome will be what it will be, but your happiness is not affected by the outcome. Because you cannot control the outcome, you can fail, and still be content because you enjoyed the process and did your best. You may not get that promotion. You may not win the race. But your self worth, your contentment will not be dependent on those things.

Another thing to consider is that we can’t develop our virtues of Justice, Wisdom, Temperance, and Courage without engaging with other people. All of these are things that we improve while we work on other things. You don’t gain wisdom by just sitting in your room reading books. You may get knowledge by doing that, but unless you interact with others it’s just knowledge.

The same goes with Courage, Justice, and Temperance. Unless you are busy with life and trying to be useful in the world, you are unable to develop these virtues. How would you know if you have courage if you are never tested? How do you develop temperance without challenges? It is by getting out into the world and trying to better ourselves in all that we do that we improves these virtues, and thereby improve the world.

As an example, say that you wanted to become a leader at your company. In doing so, you’ll have to learn how to work well with others. You’ll need to have wisdom of how to manage other people. You’ll need to learn to be fair with others, and to manage your own moods when things don’t go as planned. By putting yourself out there and trying to achieve your own goals, you’ll have to improve yourself, and in doing so you can make your work environment a much better place for yourself and those you work with. And one of the byproducts of focusing and doing the best you can with each situation as it arises, the more likely you are to succeed.

Enjoy the Present

"Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life."

— Marcus Aurelius

So what can we do to be better about being content while we work towards our goals?

First and foremost, as I’ve mentioned several times in this podcast, we can focus on the How. We do our best to grow and learn when we learn to enjoy the process of doing. When we do this, we let go of the outcome determining whether we are successful or not.

Does this mean that we will be successful?

No.

You can do everything perfectly and still not succeed. That is not a reflection on your character or whether or not you’re a good person or even whether you deserve the outcome you want. An important part of finding contentment in any situation is that you control the things you can and you let go of the things outside of your control.

You can train for decades for the Olympics, be the best in your sport, perform the best you can, and still not win a medal simply because someone else was a little better or conditions where not in your favor. How well someone else does, the decisions a judge makes, and other external factors are all outside of your control.

You can work hard at your job, put in more hours than your peers, and still get passed over for a promotion. You can study for months on end and still fail a test. And you can still find contentment if you don’t let the outcome determine your happiness.

Non-Striving

"True happiness is… to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future."

— Seneca

I think the best way to think about this comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is a former professor of medicine and author of several books including Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. He has been instrumental in bringing mindfulness and meditation into the West, and one of his key ideas is to life a life of non-striving. What he means by non-striving is that rather than constantly trying to strive and push for what you want, if you can develop and attitude of setting out in a direction and taking things as they come, you can approach things in a much more relaxed and positive way.

When you cultivate this way of looking at your life, because you’re not focused on the the outcome of what you’re working on, you are able to deal with any setbacks and challenges as they arise. They are considered part of the process of getting where you want and not things that are stopping you. You are also able to be present and focus at the task at hand, rather than being stuck focused on the future.

In the past I’ve used the example of kayaking on a river. When you’re out on the river, you know the direction you’re going, and you know that you’re going to come across rapids and eddies and other challenges along the way. If you can learn to flow and work with the currents and focus on getting through one challenge after another then you’re more likely to reach your destination and enjoy the ride along the way.

Now does this mean that if you are feeling discontented with where you are, that you are failing?

Not at all. We are emotional beings. We feel emotions even when we have worked hard to master them. Sometimes we feel unsettled for good reasons. The thing is, we need to understand WHY we feel this way. Sometimes we feel discontent because there is an injustice that we see in the world, or we are in a situation such as an unhealthy relationship or a high stress work environment. This could be a deeper signal that we need to change something.

When we feel this way, again, the most important thing we can do is to understand what we can control. Are there things that we can do to improve these situations? What actions can we take? While some things can be improved by changing our mindset around them, there are times when we need to take more drastic actions such as leaving a relationship or finding another job.

Personally, even though I’ve studied stoicism for over 6 years, I still struggle with feeling anxious and discontent with the way things are in my life. Just because I understand these principles doesn’t mean that they are easy to implement. I have to work at it every day because my natural inclination is to get focused on how things will been the future, and about how it will feel once I accomplish the things I’ve set out to do. It takes effort to remind myself to be present and enjoy where I am and what I’m doing and to let the future take care of itself.

Conclusion

We all have goals that we want to achieve in our lives. We have ambitions to be good at something and improve ourselves. When we achieve those goals we have certain sense of satisfaction that may las for a few hours to a few months. But the more that we can be in the present and be content where we are, we can have a sense of satisfaction that becomes part of our everyday lives.

It’s not a choice of being content OR achieving your goals, it’s about being content with where you are on your journey. When you focus your energy and your talents on mastering where you are, you can find contentment at any moment. You can enjoy walking the path. If all you’re focused on is the outcome, then you’re trying to control something that you can’t. Do your best, and let the chips fall where they will.

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Categories
Coffee Break stoicism Tranquility

150 – The Un-Pursuit of Happiness

The Un-Pursuit of Happiness

 

Be Useful!

Do you struggle to find happiness within yourself? Do you despair every time you watch the news? In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how to get over this despair and how pursuing happiness may not be the best to actually finding happiness.

There’s an interesting trend in a lot of things I’ve been reading online, namely a sense of despair, hopelessness, and depression almost manifesting itself as nihilism. And why is this? Why do we feel like we’re in such hard times? Is it that things were better in the past and we’ve just lost our way, as many in some circles seem to think?

If we look at how things were 100 years ago, most people were likely to be farmers, living a life with a lot of hard work keeping farm animals and harvesting crops – certainly not a life of leisure or comfort. If you lived in the city, you were very likely a factory worker, with less than ideal conditions, often with very long hours because there weren’t a lot of labor laws in place.

So why are we, with so much leisure time and modern conveniences, so unhappy?

I think that ironically it’s because as a society, we focus so much on trying to be happy. Now, why would this, the search for happiness, make so many people unhappy? Isn’t this what we’re supposed to do with our lives? It even says in the American Declaration of Independence from the British that we have the right to “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But that’s the thing – we’re not guaranteed happiness, we’re only given the opportunity to pursue happiness. But I think it’s this dogged pursuit that gives us so much anguish. So why does pursuing happiness not bring happiness? I mean we’re taught from an early age that when we want something that we go out and get it. I think that happiness it a byproduct of doing useful and good things in our lives. When we try to make ourselves happy, we can’t. It’s like trying pet a cat. The more you chase after the cat, the more it runs from you until you stop chasing it and ignore it, then it suddenly shows up trying to snuggle itself right into your face. It isn’t until we stop trying to be happy, and just focus on trying to live a good life, that happiness finds us. Happiness is what happens when we making other plans or while we’re doing other things.

Gratitude

“If what you have seems insufficient to you, then though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.”

― Seneca

If you were to ask yourself what you want in your life, what would be on that list? Would you list the things that you already have? One of the most important things that I’ve learned in studying stoicism it to be grateful for what we have, and to learn to want what we already have. If we’re always chasing some shiny object to fill that hole inside of us, we’ll always feel empty. Appreciating what we have – a place to live, family and friends, food, even the most basics of things, can immediately improve our level of happiness.

When I was in high school me and my friends used to say, “Wherever you go, there you are.” At the time it was just us being silly. I think we’d heard it on some TV commercial or show, but as I’ve gotten older, I realize that there is a profound truth in it. You can’t ever escape who you are. If you’re unhappy with who you are, if you don’t like yourself, nothing that you have, nothing that you do will ever fix that. Learning to be okay with yourself, learning to love yourself, and be good to yourself, is one of the biggest keys to happiness. I think loving who you are is an overlooked part of loving what you have. To recognize you are worthy of love despite, or maybe even because of your faults, is not an easy thing. But remember, we are all imperfect and messy and full of doubts, and every single one of us is worthy of love.

Purpose

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

— Emerson

I read an essay a while back from Darius Foroux and he proposed that life is not about being happy, it’s about being useful. That idea really struck a chord with me, because when I really think about it, the times in my life when I’ve felt the best are when I’ve taken on the challenges that I’m facing and I work at them, and I make some headway. When I’m serving other people, and I’m trying to help others through their challenges, I feel energized. When I’m working on creating something, whether that’s music or writing or this podcast, I feel like there’s purpose to my efforts. When I’m challenging myself in some way that somehow adds value to the world, I feel like I’m contributing, and that I’m helping move the world forward in some way.

Service

“One cannot pursue one’s own highest good without at the same time necessarily promoting the good of others. A life based on narrow self-interest cannot be esteemed by any honorable measurement. Seeking the very best in ourselves means actively caring for the welfare of other human beings. Our human contract is not with the few people with whom our affairs are most immediately intertwined, nor to the prominent, rich, or well educated, but to all our human brethren.”

— Epictetus

I think the last, and most important part of allowing happiness to find you, is serving others. When we focus on ourselves and only look after ourselves, we miss out on adding to something to the world. When we only look after our own happiness, remembering that happiness is a byproduct of action, the more we can give to the world, the more chances happiness will have to show up in our lives. Rather than complain about all the things that are wrong with the world, what can you do to be part of the solution? We all have something to offer, some unique talent that the world needs. Even if it’s just showing up and supporting causes that you believe in. Every good movement in the world needs people that are willing to show up.

I know that it seems like there’s so much wrong in the world. I think every age has had its struggles with problems that seem insurmountable and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But remember, you can only do what you can do, and that will be enough. Don’t get discouraged because you can’t save the world in a day. But add something good, be on the positive side of the equation, and know that you’re being part of the solution.

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