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So let’s first attempt to agree on what happiness is.
We will call happiness is a sense of rightness. That all is well with the world, all is well with our world, all is well with us. A sense that we are OK, at the right place. Another word, maybe, is contentment.
The unhappiest people around us are people who have a stringent requirements for the world, for people, for themselves…
Standards. Moral standards. Behavior standards. Right/wrong, good/bad.
If you are one of those unhappiest people… you are probably right about being right about everything.
In spite of all my efforts to help you release yourself from that prison, you probably haven’t.
You insist that the world, people, you should be the way that is RIGHT… and WRONG should be fought, tenaciously, killed until it is dead dead dead.
You see, there is no room for contentment in that profile, because there is always something that isn’t perfect.
The sad thing I have experienced with people who are hellbent to be unhappy is the more work they do with me the more reason they find to be unhappy.
So now that we know what we’ll call happiness for the purposes of this discussion, let’s see that may be there to cause no contentment. Or what’s missing that could be there. What is it that if it were there there would be a chance for more contentment.
We have seen one thing that might be there: having standards that are impossible and therefore they are always ‘violated’. The world of right and wrong.
——-Inflated self-esteem. I may be suffering from that.
What happens when you think you are better than you are? You assume that you can see everything. That you are faster than you are.
I am saying what I think is at the core of why I make so many mistakes.
I have hundreds of dollars worth of adaptors where I didn’t see that what I was buying wasn’t quite what I intended to buy.
It’s not a big deal, but… I worked for that money… and I got nothing for it. I also find that I am, in certain situations, am guy-shy. Like now, having to decide what big course idea I am going to work on.
I have considered and discarded, thus far, four ideas.
It’s not a problem, and yet being happy, content is eluding me.
——-Self-concern
Albeit that my issue with self-esteem could be a self-concern, my behavior doesn’t say that.
When you have a self-concern issue you are actively trying to prove that you are more, better, or different than how you appear in the world.
The struggle and the let-down are exactly the opposite of what we call happiness.
It is a struggle, because you need to climb on other people’s backs to get it… And it is a let-down because any hint that other people don’t buy what you are selling is a major crushing experience.
The right/wrong people actually belong to this category, but they are so focused on being right about everyone and everything being wrong, that there is no breadth of their concern.
So here are the people who want to prove that they matter, that they are valuable, that they are talented, smart, worldly, etc. etc. etc. They reek of the smell of sweat. More often than not they are in a mundane job, doing something they can do in their sleep.
They don’t expand, because expansion risks showing them and the world that they are not as they hoped they are.
They are not as talented, as contributing, as beautiful, as smart, as anything as they project themselves…
——Missing: connections with people.
When I ask people, including myself, how many people they could call in the middle of the night asking for help and would get it, I occasionally hear about a mother, a sister… but since the Pandemic people have become less social, and a lot more locking into themselves.
I, for one, have no one. If I had no clients, no students, no paid coaches, I would have no one to talk to. So my social life is non-existent.
So when it comes to expanding my circle of people I talk to, personally or online, I have to do something dramatic. I have hardly any opportunity to try out things, to just have a conversation to find out how people think… So I have stranded myself on an uninhabited island.
And if everything you ever wanted comes to you through people, I am, I can see, going to be poor. Forever. Unless I start building allies, mutually beneficial relationships, and learn how to do it… lol.
I never have learned how to do it.
In this regard I am taking after my mother, who was an unhappy person all her life.
But ultimately, unless you include other people in your world, in your plans, in your dreams, you’ll be probably poor… and even if you aren’t, you’ll be wretched.
And that is the most urgent missing.
Reading and answering Hillel’s questions:
If I am not for me, who is for me?
If I am only for myself, who am I?
And if not now, when?
My Moneyroots workshops were a great way to find the answers to most of the questions you have about money and yourself.
PS: I found this seemingly unrelated video that is brilliant at pointing out some of the reasons you are not happy.
