ARE WE MEANT TO BE HAPPY?

Are we meant to be happy?

A few days ago, I unintentionally stumbled across a short online video by one of those really aggressive male social media influencers.

You know the type.

The ones who shout a lot and tell us we’re all little bitches and we should sort our lives out by being horrible to ourselves from as early in the morning as possible.

He was shouting about how we’re not meant to be happy because we’re not children anymore, and the best thing we could do to change our lives is to forget this childish idea of happiness and just get on with things.

Inspirational.

The strange thing, though, was that on this occasion I actually agree with part of what the shouty man was shouting.

After years of studying how us weird humans work, I’ve realised the vast majority (if not all) of our problems come back to one thing: our system was built for survival and to meet our subconscious needs.

Which means it has no interest in happiness.

Think back to when we were cave people roaming around the place, before we’d built this world that we now consider normal but is as far from being suitable for us as we could possibly have created.

Our days were just about staying alive, finding food and shelter, looking after our loved ones and meeting our basic needs.

Which our system was perfectly designed to achieve.

The problem is that we’ve now created a world which on a day-to-day basis is pretty safe for most of us. There aren’t any lions to run away from and we’ve got fridges full of food.

So now we’ve turned our attention to wanting to be happy and wonder why it’s so difficult to do.

But asking our system to find happiness by default is a bit like asking our dishwasher to cook our dinner.

It’s just not designed for that.

Where I disagree with the shouty man shouting things, though, is that it is possible to reprogram our cave-person system to find as much happiness as possible, it just takes a bit of dedicated work.

It’s also important to remember that happiness is an emotional state, and not one we were ever meant to stay in permanently.

Just like all of the other emotions, they come and go like the weather and, crucially, the trick is to know that in order to enable ourselves to feel fully happy, we must also allow ourselves to feel all the emotions we’ve been taught to push away, like sadness, anger, fear and anxiety, because all our emotions come out of the same tap, so if we try to suppress any of them we end up suppressing them all.

Over the years I decided that rather than focus on happiness, the best place to aim for is a general state of peace and contentment, from which we can experience and enjoy the wide range of human emotions fully – just like we did when we were little kids, before the world taught us to suppress ourselves.

So, while it might be true that we’re not meant to be happy all of the time, it definitely isn’t true that we can’t reprogram our system to experience overall peace and contentment, with as much happiness thrown in as possible.

It just takes some work.