Wise words from Matt Haig

Apropos some of my previous posts; Matt Haig sums it up beautifully when he writes that 'happiness isn't very good for the economy'. I would go one step further and say that the media is invested in depressing us. Why? I would guess it has to do with ratings, because the more we watch, the more brainwashed we become, and then they can sell us whatever world view they wish to push on us. They have an agenda for sure. On social media, it has to do with clicks that are given to each article posted. All of the clickbait stories bring in revenue for the advertisers. Again, we’re back to money. How cynical the world has become.

Matt Haig writes:

"The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn't very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more?

How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business".

(from his book: Reasons to Stay Alive) 

In my later years

I am now living like this after years of not living like this. It's not that I was unhappy before (research science used to be a creative profession until it was taken over by bureaucrats), just that I'm happier now that I am working only for myself. I consider myself lucky that I loved what I did for many years (over thirty years working as an academic research scientist), until I didn't anymore due to the bureaucratic infiltration that hit us full on about ten years ago. No regrets about retiring. Moving on has been a happy change!

Live and let live, and mindfulness

I’ve been thinking about the ten tips for a happy life that I wrote about in my last post, and remembering back to a time when it was difficult to try to understand them enough to put them into practice. When I was younger, there were negative people in my life, who found it difficult to let others live their lives without constantly judging and criticizing them. Many of those people were seasoned adults when we were teenagers and young adults; I’m sure they had their reasons for being so critical and judgmental, but they were not the people you went to when you wanted inspiration or advice on how to be happy in life. My guess is that their own lives were unhappy, so they either did not know how to be nor could they show others how to be happy. They could not ‘live and let live’; the unhappiness in their own lives drove them crazy, I think. It rode them. Perhaps a bad marriage, a failed career, lack of money, lack of friends, emotional wounds that did not heal—there could be many reasons for the unhappiness. Some of them were intolerant individuals, particularly intolerant of the minority races they felt were taking over ‘white people’s USA’. These were the type of people who attended Sunday mass and then began to rag on the minority races the minute they came out of church. It did not make sense to me then, and it still doesn’t when people behave like that. I concluded that going to mass on Sunday does not a Christian make. I still feel that way.

It’s difficult to really practice the ten tips for a happy life unless you integrate them into your daily life. You have to understand them in order to put them into practice, and be conscious of your behavior and speech every single day. You have to be aware of what you do and say--think before you speak. Mindfulness is the key word. Wikipedia’s definition of mindfulness is ‘the intentional, accepting and non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment, which can be trained by meditational practices’. I wonder if the negative people in my past became mindful individuals who eventually found peace. I wonder if they were able to live with some sense of joy in the world together with others. I hope that for them in any case. I for one cannot imagine a more disquieting fate than being destined to leave this world as a diehard negative and intolerant person. 

Limiting the power of self-limiting beliefs over us

Is being happy an emotional option, something we can choose to be in our daily lives? If so, why don’t we choose to be happy more often? The answer may be a bit more surprising than you might think. How we choose to respond to a specific situation that happens to us or around us has to do with our belief system--about ourselves and the world around us. We may not even be fully aware of these beliefs (conscious of their presence) or of the impact they have on our lives. That is the premise of a short and unassuming book I read last week that led me to start thinking about the beliefs that I grew up with and that may still affect my present life and the choices I make. It is not the events of ordinary life per se that make us unhappy or that cause our unhappiness, rather it is how we choose to respond to them based on the beliefs that we have about ourselves that lead to un-happiness, as the author of Emotional Options, Mandy Evans, puts it. Un-happiness is the opposite of happiness--the state of not being happy. This definition suggests the idea of choice or the idea of a switch; that one could perhaps choose to switch on happiness and switch off un-happiness. It suggests that happiness is an option, a choice that we exercise to use or not to use. So that much of what happens in our ordinary lives—love, friendships, workplace interactions, and so forth—do not in and of themselves make us happy or unhappy. Yes, love can disappear or end; yes, friendships can disintegrate or we can be betrayed or deeply disappointed; yes, workplace interactions can be difficult or downright impossible leading us to feel like failures. The author’s point is that bad things happen to good people; you cannot escape or prevent that fact. Sickness and death happen, for example, betrayal and divorce likewise. The list goes on. How we respond to the bad things that happen to us is a choice that we make, even if we are not really aware of the fact that we are choosing. Our choices will make us happy or un-happy. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? When I first read this, I thought, I’ve heard this before in various guises. It’s not uncommon to hear from the self-help world that you can choose to be happy. But after thinking about it, I realized that it’s not very common to hear that un-happiness, or the state of being un-happy, is the result of some rather limiting beliefs we have about ourselves and the world around us. And it is those beliefs that are difficult to confront and subsequently change or root out. Some of those beliefs have seeped into our subconscious minds after years of hearing them repeated—by parents, teachers, authority figures, sometimes even partners/friends, and finally by ourselves to ourselves.

Mandy Evans points out that we all have a belief system—some of those beliefs we are aware of, others we are unaware of. Some of those beliefs are self-defeating beliefs (Mandy’s words), and take the following forms: waiting for happiness beliefs (many people experience this, I call it the IF ONLY way of living—I’ll be happy if only I become successful, rich, if I get even, get promoted, etc. Many people live for the future and if you asked them whether they are happy in the here and now, they wouldn’t know how to answer, because they are so focused on future happiness); events control your feelings beliefs; beliefs about anger; beliefs about changing circumstances; life-extinguishing beliefs; beliefs about punishment. And if a society believes in the value of punishment, we can find ourselves burdened with dealing with the following: the chiding inner monologue (you’re no good, you’re a fake, you don’t deserve success or happiness. How many of us can honestly say we don’t feel that way sometimes? Most women I know do, including myself, and believe me, it’s not easy to deliver a lecture about your work and feel that way when you step up to the podium); verbal abuse directed at someone else; physical abuse; torture and death. She defines happiness as emotional freedom. How do we get there? That’s what this book should help you with—getting there. And when you arrive there, it should be able to help you stay there, because there’s always the possibility of slipping backwards. We don’t live in a perfect world, so we will never achieve perfection of the self. But if we confront ourselves when we think in black and white rigid ways, or when we are afraid, anxious, depressed or defeatist, picking up this book, reading it through and asking ourselves the questions it poses can help. I bought a Kindle version of the book, and have already highlighted many passages. It will help me find those sections that I might want to re-read at a future point when I need a pep talk. Because I admit it, I need pep talks. My inner voices are not always kind to me. I wish I knew where they came from. I feel sure that some of them are a direct result of our upbringing in the 1970s: it was not a good thing to be proud, assertive, boastful, too smart, too good-looking, too free, too anything. Like the ‘jantelov’ in Norway (you should never think that you are ‘someone’ or that you are better than anyone else), some of the ways we woman were encouraged to behave when we were growing up were downright detrimental to our self-esteem and held many of us down, or kept us in our ‘places’. But isn’t it the case that we chose to stay in our places, or that it is easier to blame men or bad bosses or ungrateful friends for what has become of us in life? The fact remains that there are unenlightened men who want to hold women down or keep them out of the upper echelons of power, and there are bad bosses. What we do with these situations, how we respond to them, is what ultimately leads us to happiness or un-happiness. I don't have to be unkind or get angry in order to deal with them; it's a choice. I have to admit that I have reacted angrily to situations that may have worked out better had I not done so. Emotional freedom; for me--not wasting energy on people and issues that drain me and suck the life out of me (emotional vampirism). Not being angry at myself and others for things I haven't been clear about up until now. Who knew emotional freedom (how you yourself define it) could be so important for our well-being? The author states clearly that she doubts that beliefs govern all of our feelings. But she knows for certain that what you believe plays a strong and overlooked role in everything you feel. So if you ‘believe’ that you should listen yet once more to an emotional vampire, or accept psychological abuse at the hands of a bad boss—in other words, if you believe that you should be a victim—you will choose to be one. It makes sense to me.

Sharing happiness and being happy for others

The death of Whitney Houston, like Amy Winehouse before her, is always a wake-up call to pay attention to the lives we have, right now, today. Today is all we have. Instead of wishing our lives away, hoping for better times in the future, or worrying too much about the past, we are reminded that it is best to focus on today. These are just two of many enormously-talented people in the world who achieved fame, years of fame, and for all their fame, did not seem to find the happiness they were seeking. Their lives sunk into the hell that is drug abuse; their personal pain and negative experiences are poignant reminders that fame and wealth will not necessarily bring happiness. I read somewhere that Whitney’s husband was jealous of her professional fame, and that this led to psychological and physical abuse on his part. If he managed to drag her down rather than her pulling him up, how sad is that. Is professional jealousy a common thing in marriage and relationships? I don’t know. Sometimes I am tempted to answer yes, especially the more fame and wealth one partner achieves compared to the other. Fame and wealth may be good to have; we may experience them as rewards for a job well-done. They may make life easier, but they cannot buy happiness or guarantee it. And that must be the bitter rub. With all the money in the world, one cannot buy the love of another, not if it is real love one is out after. And one cannot buy happiness.

Happiness is an elusive thing, and no one has managed to define it satisfactorily (at least for me) to date. It is a very personal experience—for some it may be the experience of family life, for others career success, for others the realization of personal dreams. For some it may be a combination of all these things. For others it may be daily contact with nature and with the animals and birds around us. It is important to acknowledge the happy times in our lives; important to tell others when we are happy. There is too much focus in our world on telling others when we are sad, depressed, upset, or angry; not enough focus on telling others when we are feeling happy, content, joyful or at peace, or when others make us happy. Why this is I cannot say. Perhaps we always want to share the negative. Or perhaps we are afraid to share the positive. Afraid that others will take our happiness from us, or come with a flippant or sarcastic comment concerning our happiness. Sometimes just verbalizing something positive sounds so strange, out-of-place, unnatural. Or perhaps we are afraid that we will hear the standard well-meaning advice that many people tell you—don’t get too wrapped up in your happiness; the bad times will come again. Don’t get too comfortable or don’t be too happy about being happy. As though that was a crime. Others may feel guilty about finding happiness, especially when they know that family and friends have not found it. Why can’t we be happy for others when they find happiness? It is no reflection on our lives if they find happiness. We can choose our responses, and I think it's best to choose to be happy for others and to support them when they are happy. Wouldn’t you want others to be happy for you when it’s your turn? Don’t you love the people who turn to you when you are happy and say—‘I’m so happy for you right now’. It’s freeing, it’s loving, it’s generosity in action. God bless those people. 

Just being

It’s not taking me too much time to get used to the idea of having a month off from work. Years ago, I would never have taken such a long vacation from work. The idea did not appeal to me at all. Now, having large blocks of time off from work is what appeals to me the most. How we change as we get older. Or is it the circumstances of work that change us? Is it that we realize that there is no real point in giving up most of our waking lives to workplaces that do not really notice our loyalty or dedication? You could be there for sixty hours a week or for forty hours a week and the workplace won’t notice or reward you. Or it will reward you regardless—meaning that you and all the other members of your union will be rewarded equally, with a three percent pay raise, and you might get an extra percentage point if your bosses think you did a good job. But unless you’re completely hopeless, everyone will get the extra percentage point, so it doesn’t really ‘count’. These days, it’s all fine with me. After a pretty disappointing and sad work year, I’ve accepted what I thought I never could accept—my limitations—and I’m fine with that. I’ve let go of my unrealistic expectations concerning my career future without resigning myself to the fact that it had to be this way. I chose this path I’m on now; no one chose it for me. I’ve accepted my limitations and I’m happy. I’m not a top scientist, I’m not a union leader or even a board member, I’m not a group leader, and I’m not really marketable to the work world at large anymore. I am a good person, a kind person, and I am a good boss. The people who’ve worked for me tell me that. It’s finally getting through to me. I was a good leader to those I had responsibility for mentoring a few years ago. I did the best job I knew how to do. I was available for my team and I worked hard with them and for them. I wanted them to succeed. And they have, just not in my sphere anymore. They’re on their own, making their own way, as it should be. And me, I’ve let go of my desires to want to keep them around me, to keep my team intact, to ‘grow’ a group. It was hard, it was sad, sometimes it felt like it was impossible to let go. But I did. Want to know something? I’m happy. I’m happy just being me. I like who I am. Kindness and compassion are at a premium in my profession; I'm glad I have both. 

Just being. It’s a nice expression. Peaceful, soothing, like listening to water gurgling in a running brook or listening to birds chirping and talking to each other. I find that I so look forward to the sounds of nature now—be it the birds, or cats, or dogs, or even insects. They are ‘just being’—just being themselves, chirping, meowing, barking or buzzing. They do what they do to the best of their ability, yet they are unconscious of their ‘being’. We are conscious of it, and we can choose to ‘just be’. We can choose to slow our minds down, to empty them, to fill them with peace and happiness, to shut out unhappiness and negativity (foisted upon us by others who want to dump on us, possibly because they want others to be miserable like they are). The media are great at the latter. Not a day goes by without them reporting a story that is bound to irritate, provoke or otherwise depress us. Whenever I see a ‘nice’ story, I gravitate toward it now. They are so few and far between. Sometimes I forget that the world is actually an ok place—that there are not murderers around every street corner, or terrorists at every airport, or robbers waiting to mug me at every turn. Does it mean I should not be careful? No. It just means that I can be careful and still have a smile on my face when I greet the world at large.

I look forward to ‘just being’ during my vacation. By that I mean, having no work expectations, no pressure, no stress, no grant or article deadlines, no phone calls, and no work emails. My free time will be spent reading, writing, taking pictures, walking, biking, cooking, boating, traveling, and visiting family and friends. Not a bad way to spend four weeks. We have a lot planned, but it’s all fun and it’s all good. And my attitude toward vacation and free time tells me that I won’t have a problem retiring early when that time comes. I will ‘let go’ of more and more with each passing year. I have a tendency to be that way—to see things coming and to try and be a bit preemptive, so that I know that I am ‘choosing’ my path. From here on in, that’s my path—to choose my path. And I am choosing to ‘just be’ in this world, in my world, in my life.