Humans have a knack for keeping themselves busy. We have so many things we must do: family events, work, social groups, work, housework, routines, and even work. We do many of these things out of obligation rather than selectively for enjoyment. As we do these things out of obligation, we tend to maintain that "obligation energy." We know these activities as requirements and not as play, and this withers our stores of energy and enjoyment.
We need to take a step back and truly analyze why we do the things we do—especially for work. In the west, our culture has greatly shifted toward career and income as main focuses of attention. We generally choose our career for the sake of the income. But why? We intuitively understand that money is good to have, but most of us stop our analysis right there. We must work. We must make money. Money equals survival and survival seems to be the goal. And if we have more money, we survive even harder?
Obviously we wish to do more than simply survive and we intuit that we'd like to enjoy our lives as well. Money will enable us to enjoy our lives, so we simply seek more money expecting that it will enable more enjoyment here and there. Unfortunately, we're optimizing for money rather than optimizing for enjoyable survival and that quest for money often undermines the actual enjoyment we're able to incur. There are diminishing returns in our quest for more money.
Life is a game of balance. We have so much energy to put toward things every day. We can sacrifice some energy each day for things that enable us to use that energy in more preferred ways later. But we rarely stop to consider the ratio of our sacrifices to enjoyment. If we could have twice as much enjoyment over sacrifice, is that not preferred to twice as much sacrifice over enjoyment? Surely, it is. And yet, we optimize for money rather than for enjoyment. Heck, most of us don't even realize what we prefer to begin with. We're so busy optimizing for money that we don't have time to consider what we truly want. We just assume that eventually we'll have just the right amount of money to finally make us happy.
Unfortunately, as we all should already know, money in and of itself does not make us happy. But if we're so busy chasing money, we have little time to consider what does—and yet, this is the most important aspect of life. If we found that we could be happy fishing all day, then how much money do we truly need? We need just enough to live somewhere, eat, and buy fishing gear. That's not a lot. We could move somewhere warm and live in a tent year round and maybe sell a fish or two every day to pay for tent repairs and fishing gear replacements.
Granted, most people would expect to want more than fishing for the rest of their lives. Some people like playing video games, watching movies, traveling, creating, or any wide range of activities. But the question is, do you even know what you want? A bigger house and a new car aren't really the things that will make us happy. Things never do. Things are very passive. It's the activities that we enjoy and that we should be considering. Do we enjoy performing perpetual maintenance on a house? If not, it might not be worth buying a larger house. We can enjoy the status we feel from a larger house, but are we going to walk around all day basking in our status? Probably not. If we are truly able to bask in our larger house and enjoy it intentionally every day, then maybe it's a good choice to pursue, but if in that pursuit we lose the time, energy, and frame of mind to enjoy it, then once again it is a poor tradeoff.
In the end, it is activity that has the opportunity to bring us joy—even if that activity is staring out a window at the trees while sipping coffee. Mindfulness is they key to actually experiencing the joys of our activities. However, we often fail to do this. If we're lost in thought wrestling with ideas or problems, whatever activity we are performing is lost to the void. We don't get the return on investment beyond what the activity itself produces. If the activity is sipping coffee, then we gained no joy and simply obtained a fuller bladder and more jitter. If we look at the coffee, feel the coffee, smell the coffee, smile at the birds, sit in wonder, breathe, and sigh intentionally, then the activity truly brought us joy and restoration. Mindfulness is key to actual enjoyment. Anything else is yet more drainage.
So what activities can we be mindful of that bring us joy? And how much money do we truly need to obtain those things? How much variation do we need? How often? If we truly start to optimize for these things, we may find that we don't need to strive any further. How amazing would it be to drop half our workload because we realize we don't actually need more money? Not only do we drop a loss of energy, we can utilize that for something that brings us energy—the return is twice as much as what we dropped.
There is yet another secret to using mindfulness for happiness: it can apply to any activity whatsoever. This takes skill, but one can be mindful of the wonders of the universe around them while picking up dog poop or filling in a spreadsheet at their desk. If we're just starting off, we may not be so great at finding those opportunities, but if we can manage to be mindful without focusing on negativity or fear, anything and everything can become a source of joy.
In the end, there is only one thing that matters: being in a mental state which is agreeable to us. And this is so extremely dependent on ourselves and how we view the world and our activities, that it is hardly worth considering any external factors whatsoever. Apart from literal abuse of others, we hold the keys in our own hands and minds—we simply need to train our minds and focus on our actual objective to align our thoughts with what brings us joy.
For more, check out www.flow-restoration.com/Reflections.html
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