Pursuing happiness is not the purpose of human life.

Happiness is an emotion. Just like any other emotion it’s an indicator. It indicates your state of being.

When you are in the right place at the right time you are happy. It’s your body’s way of telling you: ‘good job, keep doing this’

The opposite is pain, anxiety or boredom etc. These emotions make you feel bad so that you know you are doing something wrong.

The point is happiness is not the goal of life. Happiness is what we get when we advance towards our goal of life.

So what’s wrong with happiness being the goal of our life? Heres why:

1. It’s unstable. Life can’t be all happiness all the time. Suffering is inevitable. If your goal in life is happiness, then suffering makes life meaningless and makes you wanna suicide.

2. It can easily be manipulated. You can be happy doing drugs, watching Netflix, gambling or wasting money any other way. All of these are bad in the long run and a waste of human life.

3. Many things that give life meaning and purpose also make us less happy. Like, it’s statistically proven that people with children are less happy than people without children. But it’s worthwhile to have children. It’s one of the best blessings of life and not because it makes our overall happiness increase but because it makes our overall satisfaction level increase. And they are two different things that are mutually exclusive.
4. Happiness makes a person impulsive. A happy person can be too brave or too generous or too optimistic. This makes them take stupid and dangerous steps that will bring disaster upon them later

The pursuit of happiness irks me. This is what mass murderers use as their arguments. They say if the purpose of life is happiness and most people are suffering then life should cease to exist.

Wrong. Purpose of life is not happiness. Happiness is just another emotion. The purpose of human existence or life in general has to be greater than just feeling one emotion all the time. Even if that emotion feels good.

So what is the purpose of our life? That’s a topic for another blog post..

Don’t kill the kid inside you.

The kid inside you knows no reality. It doesn’t really care. It doesn’t have to. Only thing it cares about is what it wants. That’s it. Give it to him. Now. It’s not gonna stop whining until it’s been given to it.

So you have two choices. Listen to it and work your ass off to meet it’s unreal expectations. Or kill it.

I am here to suggest that you should not kill it. Rather nurture it. Work for it. Love and cherish it’s existence.

It’s the voice inside you that keeps saying you’re not done yet. That you don’t wanna be just good, you wanna be the best. That your not gonna settle. That you won’t take no as an answer. Ever.

It’s also the curious side of you. That believes the key to this world is knowledge. The part of you that is humble enough to ask. To bother others for an answer. That believes that there is an answer somewhere. You just have to find it.

The kid inside you will push you. It will give you energy, motivation and a worthy cause. It will take your hand and take you towards greatness.

Don’t let the kid inside you die. The voice that tells you that it’s all or nothing. That you deserve whatever you wish for. You may reason with it, show it better things to long for. But don’t kill it.

Why Learn from Others? How?

The first humans had to learn from scratch. There was no label attached to anything.

Something sounds good? It’s nothing but soothing sound until someone called it- Music.

Someone writes well? Let’s call him a writer.

Oh that guy thinks clearly and his logic makes sense! Let’s call him a philosopher.

Thus labels were created. Infinite potential became infinite fields of study- Infinite labels to achieve.

Now, no one’s good enough. As Jordan Peterson says in his book, “Who cares if you are the prime minister of Canada if someone else in the president of United States!”

South Park complains- Simpsons have already done it! Which implies that there seems to be lack of fresh ideas remaining.

Does this make the world uninteresting? Have we really come to a place where it’s finally boring to live and to learn?

Heck no! Not even close! It’s the opposite. It’s the greatest time to be alive. Even for the creative types.

You see no body creates from the scratch. Creativity is nothing but solving the same puzzle in a different way. We do this by combining existing resources.

Nokia used to make great phones and Sony used to make great cameras.

What did the most innovative company of the century- Apple do? They put camera, phone, web browsing, music everything in one thing, made it easier than others to access those things and called it a great invention. People swear by the name of iPhones. But someone else had already made similar stuff? Haven’t they?

Part 2:

It’s people like Tom Bilyeu who makes me feel like life is a game worth playing. What does he do? He invites people from different fields of study to tell their stories. Writers, designers, entrepreneurs you name it!

Learning is so easy now! Let’s say you want to learn how to rhyme. 2000 years ago you’d have to practice, fail, brainstorm, find a mentor blah blah blah.

Only if somebody else had already cracked the code! What if you didn’t need to rediscover anything? Rather, focus your efforts on learning what’s been already done and then progress further along the way?

Well, now you can! You can find every song ever published by Eminem on YouTube. For free! Who better to teach you rhyming than the God of rap himself!

You want to learn how to build an Artificially intelligent being? What if you wanna learn how rockets work? Or maybe you just want to learn how to cook your favorite dish by yourself?

There’s no limit! Somebody has already cracked the codes!

A solid example of what I’m trying to say:

Are you shy and want to learn socializing? Go google Vanessa Van Edwards. Thank me later.

This amazing woman has dedicated her whole life to crack the social code. She has hired experts, run experiments in the real world through numerous people, has written books and produced videos about it.

What do you have to do? Just learn what she has already discovered! What’s your reward? You’ll get closer to your existing friends and acquaintances, you’ll find more love and spread more joy! You may learn how to deal with toxic people. You’ll make new friends, hold better position in your job, influence your employees… sky is the limit really.

And you don’t have to spend strenuous time and energy on rediscovering anything! The dish has been served already! Just go and eat. You’ll get healthier in a matter of days!

Imagine if we insisted on reinventing the wheel! How dumb would that be? What makes us humans so great is our ability to store knowledge.

If I’ve found something with great efforts, I’ll write it down so that my sons and their sons and daughters won’t have to rediscover! They will build upon it!

That’s how lucky we are! Rabindranath Tagore has already cracked the codes of poetry! Elon Musk has already shown how to pursue an impossible dream and still succeed! Let’s learn from them. Let’s build upon them!

Humans are Running on Outdated Software: Part 2

In part one of this post I talk about Endorphin, Dopamine and Serotonin. Go check out that first if you haven’t already- here

I said that serotonin can be dangerous. But how? Well, it can make us want status so much that we forget to care about other humans. Which is not good. Corporations are sometimes on the victim side of this as their serotonin boosted Executives forget about employee’s well being.

If you feel like you need more confidence, what you need is a boost in serotonin. An easy way to get that is to by keeping good posture.

It’s time to talk about Oxytocin now. It’s often referred to as the ‘love chemical’ as it gives us sense of bond and fondness towards someone else. Oxytocin can make you want to do good for another person and feel good for it. It created comrade in armed forces and other organizations. Lack of Oxytocin and too much dopamine and serotonin in an organization may lead to too much competitiveness where everyone is trying to one up the other person. But boost oxytocin and people become cooperative and creativity flows.

There’s one more brain chemical that I want to talk about briefly. It’s called Cortisol.

Cortisol is anxiety, stress, feelings of threat. I makes our heart pump faster and our blood go quicker. It prepares us for fight or flight. It’s what pro’s call excitement before a performance and beginners call nervousness.

Cortisol is awesome for all this reasons and more. But sustained exposure to it all the time can cause from fatigue and headache to various diseases. It can generate bad mood which in turn ruins marriages and disturbs children’s mental health.

What causes a sustained overexposure?

Overly competitive workplace, low job security, anything that causes feelings of threat- like maybe comparing your humble life with the great life everyone else seem to have on display for Instagram etc.

All the other animals benefit immensely from these brain chemicals. For example, a herd deer will stop eating when they feel a Lion approaching, run for their lives with high doses of cortisol in their blood and then rest when safe. Their cortisol level will go down and they will start eating and chilling again.

But, we humans don;t live in an organic natural environment like that anymore. We are in a more advanced and sophisticated society.

We have excess of food and we can eat easily whenever we want. So there’s no need for us to be stuffing all the food at once as our dopamine tells us to. We abuse the good feelings of dopamine by watching excessive porn, gambling and staying an unusual amount of time in social media sites. All of these are harmful and should be avoided.

We live in a society where every workplace is highly competitive and there’s always backstabbers (read Lions) lurking around. For this, we are in a dangerously high dosage of cortisol- all the time! This chemical was not designed to fight in this new environment we created and now its ruining our mental and physical health and relationships.

That is why I say we humans are running on outdated softwares. Do we need an upgrade? Maybe! But also maybe not! As we can always make conscious changes in our actions. We can chose not to overeat and we can chose not to waste our lives in social media. We can refuse to work in a stressful workplace or instead we can meditate and learn how to control our own stress levels.

Socrates said, “know thyself”. This is more imperative now than ever. We need to learn about how we function so that we don’t become a victim of our own system.

See you in the next post 🙂