Am I happier for all this effort?
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Last week I told you how to be happier in 3 simple steps. My biggest beef with the wellness industrial complex is when people make claims they can’t support with evidence. Every claim I made is, I believe, supported with empirical evidence. Studies show that the average person has a better time when they do that shit.
But I wondered, am I happier for having tried doing those three things?
When I went into therapy, I didn’t expect to become happier. My goal was to do less unnecessary suffering.
Here’s what I can say with some confidence. My efforts have yielded a more interesting existence. My problems have changed. And the way I think about them and deal with them has changed a lot. My problems are more interesting, at least to me, as a result of my efforts.
I’m still a miserable fuck. But I’d estimate that up to half of nights, maybe more sometimes, when I’m tucking myself into bed I’m overwhelmed with a deep gratitude for my life. I used to feel this way sometimes. My adult life has always kind of rocked in any objective sense of the word, if I’m honest. I haven’t been in poverty at any point in adulthood or faced serious illness or disability. I’m white, able-bodied, cis, intelligent, educated, and talented. My Autism is mild enough and I’m smart enough to have learned how to mask reasonably well. My mental illnesses are far from debilitating.
But it’s really been since going full-time on Sex and the State that I’ve been consistently awestruck by the amazingness of my existence. I had highs before. Accomplishments and recognition. But I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life, since graduating from college, working two or three jobs at a time the entire time, save a few brief stints of unemployment when that would drop down to one or two. I went from bored in a marriage I needed to leave to making less than the area median income in two extremely expensive cities. I was constantly exhausted and felt like I was walking on a tightrope, juggling. All the time.
What got me through was working hard and finding meaning in this newsletter and in my friends. Believing one day maybe if I worked hard enough, long enough, someday I’d get to do it full-time.
Today, I’m less busy than I’ve been at any point in at least twelve years. But when I hit the hay I not only feel the accomplishment of working hard. But I feel accomplished at working hard at the work I feel intensely called to.
Thinking it through, I suspect all the work I’ve done hasn’t necessarily made me happier. I think it’s helped me shift into a space that’s less survival-mode and more expansive long-term planning and execution. It’s given me the ability to consider giving myself permission to rest. It’s enabled me to berate myself less severely and often for having unpleasant and unproductive feelings. It’s helped me consider that maybe I’m worthy of love outside of what I produce. It’s helped me find meaning in my relationships. And to take steps to make those relationships deeper and more meaningful.
All those things have helped me, maybe even made it possible for me, to do Sex and the State full-time.
Someone on Twitter responded to last week’s post pointing out that I didn’t include gratitude in my list of tips. And it’s true that there’s pretty good research showing gratitude is a huge contributor to happiness. I didn’t include it because I’ve tried to maintain a daily gratitude habit/ritual and it’s yet to stick.
I’m reminded of smoking a clove cigarette on my porch in Alabama thinking about seeing a doctor and getting a prescription for antidepressants. Turns out a divorce worked better.
Shifting my life shifts my mind. I have to act myself into right thinking. Every time I blow up my life I rebuild it better.
I don’t have a gratitude ritual. But I am extremely, profoundly grateful. I have a life that is smaller than I expected in a lot of ways. But it is more engaging, powerful, meaningful, and exciting than I could have ever dreamed. It is endlessly, undeniably interesting.
To me, depression and boredom are inextricably linked. Happiness looks like, among other things, engagement and curiosity. It looks like flow. Today my job is to cultivate my curiosity. I spend a lot of my productive time in flow.
I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. I get to get up every morning and do pretty exactly what I feel I was uniquely made to do.
So if you, too, are a miserable fuck, I guess my advice is to do the things that you can do to become the person who can work on building a life that gives you shivers of gratitude. A life you cannot believe you get to live.
I don’t know whether that’s happiness. But I know that it’s pretty baller.
And I think it’s worth the effort. Because hope is the thing that keeps us getting up in the morning. If you do one thing every day aimed at improving your life, your brain will decide it’s possible your life will improve in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance of believing one thing while doing another. And doing something new will, necessarily, make your life more interesting. A more interesting life with more hope might not be happiness either. But it’s still pretty baller.
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