Asking for a friend. No seriously, I’m trying to figure out how to best explain this to a friend as I’m having trouble enumerating how I can do it.
Asking for a friend. No seriously, I’m trying to figure out how to best explain this to a friend as I’m having trouble enumerating how I can do it.
I’ll take a stab at this. Being happy by yourself is about finding contentment and satisfaction with your life that doesn’t depend on external validation or reinforcement.
The first step is always going to be finding things you like and that motivate you. You have to take care to check in with yourself and decide whether the things you are doing are motivated by habit, by social desire, or by your own desire. The things you are looking for are the ones that fall in the last category. You’ll have to be honest with yourself to figure those things out.
Second step is going to be constructing goals from some of those desires. Not everything you like will be worth making goals from, but think about how you can make those things better and more fulfilling for you. Do you want to get better at whatever it is, as a skill? Do you want to share the product of crafts with others? Do you want to make it easier and more accessible for yourself?Figure out if any if these desires or activities can evolve to be more.
Third is making changes in your lifestyle to match. Reorient your life to your motivations. Figure out how to balance working towards your goals and indulging your whims. This is where the happiness and contentment on your own should be. If you are doing things you love regularly, and working towards goals that you want to achieve, that should bring a sense of fulfillment and contentment that doesn’t rely on other people to support it.
This is a great take. It’s sad that most ‘self help’ is not this clear or articulate… mostly because it’s snake oil that’s about feelings and not about pragmatic choices.
Unhappy people never make pragmatic choices… they are always chasing these abstract nonsense concepts that they will never attain, because they are not attainable. Wanting to be good at something is very different and vague, but setting a reasonable goal of wanting to achieve something in a set time is is a way to build a rewarding and self-validating life. Especially if it’s set against yourself. “I want to be 1m faster in my 5K run” is clear and attainable goal, but saying “I want to win every 5K I enter this year” is one that is going to lead to failure.
And most people setup their goals very much like the latter. Every miserable person I meet is just… often very angry they aren’t leading a lifestyle of fame and wealth, and rather than making smart choices to enhance their improve es year by year, they just go on debt binges or other self-destructive choices that move their further away from their desires. And often those desire aren’t even really their own… they are just stuff they are convinced they want because other people want it and they need to want it too otherwise people won’t like them…