The Hidden Costs of Happiness

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The Hidden Costs of Happiness

 

Because nothing in life is free.

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

Anyone who has ever taken an economics class has heard the phrase, “There’s no

such thing as a free lunch.”

It means that everything has a cost, even if that cost is not always immediately

apparent. To achieve anything, you must give up something else.

In today’s happiness-obsessed culture, most pursue just the opposite: we want to know

how to be happy with no costs, all benefits. We want the rewards without the risks, the

gain without the pain.

But ironically, it’s this unwillingness to sacrifice anything, to give up anything, that

makes us more miserable.

As with anything else, happiness has costs. It is not free. And despite what Cover Girl

or Tony Robbins or the Dalai Lama once told you, it’s not always easy breezy figuring

out how to be happy either.

1. You Must Accept Imperfection and Flaws

Many people believe that if they just collect a house, a spouse, a car, and 2.5 children,

everything will be “perfect.” Life has a checklist. You check each item off, you get to be

happy and old for a couple decades, then you die.

But life doesn’t work that way. Problems don’t go away — they change and evolve.

Today’s perfection becomes tomorrow’s swampy cesspool of shit, and the quicker we

accept that the point of life is progress and not perfection, the sooner we can all order a

pizza and go home.

Perfection is an idealization. It’s something that is approached but never reached.

Whatever your conception of “perfect” is in your pretty little head, it is, in itself, an

imperfect conception.

 

There is no perfect. There is only what you wish in your head.

 

We don’t get to decide what perfection is. We don’t know. All we can know is what is

better or worse than what is now. And even then we’re often wrong.

 

When we let go of our conception of what is perfect and what “should” be, we relieve

ourselves of the stress and frustration of living up to some arbitrary standard. And

usually, this standard isn’t even ours! It’s a standard we adopted from other people.

Accepting imperfection is hard because it forces us to accept that we have to live with

things we don’t like. We don’t want to give that up. We want to hold on to control and

let the whole world know how Canadian democracy should be and why the season

finale to Breaking Bad was all messed up.

But life will never conform to all of our desires. Ever. And we will always be wrong

about something, in some way. Ironically, it’s the acceptance of this that allows us to be

happy with it, allowing us to appreciate the flaws in ourselves and in others. And that,

my friends, is a good thing.

2. You Must Take Responsibility For Your Problems

Blaming the world for our problems is the easy way out. It’s tempting and it can even be

satisfying. We’re the victims and we get to be all emo and indignant at all of the terrible

injustices that have been inflicted upon us. We wallow in our imagined victimhood so

as to make ourselves feel unique and special in ways in which we never got to feel

unique and special anywhere else.

But our problems are not unique. And we are not special.

The beauty of accepting the imperfection of your own knowledge is that you can no

longer be certain that you’re not to blame for your own problems. Are you really late

because of traffic? Or could you have left earlier? Is your ex really a selfish asshole?

Or were you manipulative and overly demanding towards him? Is it really the

incompetence of your manager that lost you your promotion? Or was there something

more you could have done?

 

The truth is usually somewhere around “both,” — although it varies from situation to

situation. But the point is that you can only fix your own imperfections and not the

imperfections of others. So you may as well get to work on them.

 

Sure, shit happens. It’s not your fault a drunk driver hit you and you lost your leg to a

botched surgery. But it’s your responsibility to recover from that loss, both physically

and emotionally.

So get recovering.

Blaming others for the problems in your life may give you a smidgen of short-term relief,

but ultimately it implies something entirely insidious: that you are incapable of

controlling your own fate. And that’s the most depressing assumption of all to live with.

 

3. You Must Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

 

Bravery is not the absence of fear. Bravery is feeling the fear, the doubt, the insecurity,

and deciding that something else is more important.

 

If we identify with our moment-to-moment emotional states and sensitivities, our

happiness will surge and crash like a deregulated Wall Street derivatives orgy. For

those of you who don’t know anything about Wall Street, that’s really bad. We want

sturdy, resilient happiness.

Not derivatives orgies.

 

True, long-lasting, kid-tested-and-mother-approved happiness is derived not from our

immediate emotional states — being constantly giddy is not only impossible, but it would

be unbearably annoying — but rather is derived from the deeper values we define for

ourselves. Our Ultimate Life Satisfaction™ is not defined by what we do and what

happens to us, but why we do what we do and why it happens to us.

 

4. You Must Find a Deeper Purpose to Your Actions

 

A better way of saying this is you must choose what is motivating you. Is it something

superficial and external or something deeper and more meaningful?

 

Being motivated by money for the sake of money leads to unstable emotional

regulation and a lot of obnoxious and superficial behavior. Being motivated by money

so that one can provide a good life for their family and children is a much sturdier

foundation to work with. That deeper purpose will motivate one through the stress and

fear and inevitable complications that a more superficial motivation would not.

 

Being motivated by the approval of others leads to needy and unattractive behavior.

Being motivated by the approval of others because you’re an artist and you want to

construct art that moves and inspires people in new and powerful ways is far more

sustainable and noble. You’ll be able to work through disapproval, embarrassments,

and the occasional disaster.

 

How does one find their deeper purpose? Well, it’s not easy. But then again, robust

and resilient lifelong happiness isn’t easy either.

 

 (What, you mean nobody ever told you that?)

 

A large chunk of my book is about finding a deeper purpose in our lives. But here’s a

hint: it has something to do with growth and contribution. Growth means finding a way

to make yourself a better person. Contribution means finding a way to make other

people better. Look for ways that you can integrate those into your motivations.

 

There’s nothing wrong with sex, money, and rock and roll (hey, preaching to the choir

here). But the sex needs to be motivated by something deeper than sex, the money

needs to be motivated by a value more sustainable than simply money, and the rock

and roll needs to just fucking rock. Find a way to slide growth and/or contribution under

them and bam — you get the best of both worlds.

 

5. You Must Be Willing to Fail and Be Embarrassed

 

In my book on dating, I wrote, “You cannot be a powerful life-changing presence to

some people without being a complete joke and embarrassment to others.”

 

Interestingly, this has become probably the most quoted line from the book and the one

I get emailed about the most often.

 

The beautiful thing about humanity is the diversity of life values. When you live out

your values and let them motivate your actions and behaviors, you will inevitably clash

with those whose values contradict your own. These people will not like you. They will

leave nasty anonymous comments on the internet and make inappropriate remarks

about your mother. Anything you do that’s important will inevitably be accompanied by

those who wish for you to fail. Not because they’re bad people, but because their

values differ from yours.

 

(OK, some of them are fucking awful people.)

 

As someone much wiser than me once said, “Haters gonna hate.”

 

In any venture, failure is required to make progress. And progress, by definition, is what

drives happiness — the progress of ourselves, the progress of others, the progress of

our values and what we care about. Without failure, there is no progress and without

progress, there is no happiness.

 

Relish the pain. Bathe in the scorn. One of the most important skills in life is not how to

avoid getting knocked down, but rather learning how to stand back up. Haters gonna

hate.

 

This post originally appeared on Mark Manson and was published February 20, 2014.

This article is republished here with permission.

Mark Manson is the author of Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope.Buy the book

 

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