This happiness hack from a wildly popular Stanford class can help you create a life you love

by Dave Evans and Bill Burnett, qz.com
September 19, 2016

Thanks to master organizer Marie Kondo, many of us now evaluate our belongings based on the principle that things we love should bring us joy. But too often, we fail to bring the same level of scrutiny to the rest of our lives. Just as passivity can leave us buried under a lot of junk we don’t need, so can we aimlessly fall into patterns of behavior that don’t serve us well and wind up leading a muted life.

In our new book, Designing Your Life, we draw from design principles and techniques to explain how to create a life you love. The first step in this process is to understand yourself—which means taking a close look at how you’re faring in the areas of health, work, play, and love.

The Good Time Journal is a technique to facilitate this process. The goal is to make you notice which activities make you happy and give you energy, and which ones don’t. The journal gives us a framework for reflection so that we can better tease out what’s working in our lives and use that knowledge to shape our futures.

To get started, we recommend thinking about the last time that you were on cloud 9—an experience that gave you a glimpse of adrenaline-induced ecstasy, if only for a moment. It could be the feeling you had when you got a great new job offer, fell in love, finished a marathon or traveled to a beautiful country. This kind of memory is called a peak experience. Examining it can help you to look at events in the future, designing a more fulfilling life in the process.

Write down a peak experience you’ve had. For our friend Savannah, who we’ll use as an example, it was delivering the keynote speech at a large international technology conference.

Now apply the AEIOU method. Ask yourself the following questions and write down your observations. You can apply this framework to future reflections you do on your activity log as well.

Activities: What were you actually doing? Was this a structured or unstructured activity? Did you have a specific role to play (presenter, leader, researcher, etc.) or were you simply a participant in or attendee of the experience?

In Savannah’s case, the event was structured. The keynote had been planned for months and her role as a presenter was clearly defined. However, she was able to make changes to her content up until the night before the event, which is unconventional and unstructured compared to most speaking events. She found that she really enjoys that spontaneity and would be bored if she had to deliver a speech that was “in the can” weeks before the event.

Environment: Our environment has a profound effect on our emotional state. A crowded football stadium will bring some people joy; others will find happiness in a cathedral. Notice where you were during the activity. What kind of place was it, and how did it make you feel?

Savannah is admittedly a bit of a ham. She delivered this presentation in a large theater. She, unlike most of us, feels at her best when public speaking and finds her flow moments on stage, when she feels connected to her audience. It also helped that this event happened in New Zealand, one of her favorite countries, and that travel is always the greatest gift to her as a presenter.

Interactions: What were you interacting with during this experience—people, animals, machines? Was it a new kind of interaction or one you are familiar with? Was it formal or informal?

There were over 500 people in the audience for Savannah’s talk, a large crowd for her. She gets energy from inspiring other people, so the balance of a formal presentation followed by informal follow-up conversations after the speech brought her joy.

Objects: Were you interacting with any objects or devices, such as smartphones, tools or toys? What were the objects that created or supported your feeling engaged?

Savannah sound-checked the presentation the day before and made sure that the remote/laser pointer had fresh batteries. She always uses a certain remote and wears her lucky shoes. When the tech team asks Savannah to “mic-up”, she knows it’s go-time. Knowing that she has all her “tools” ready to go energizes her.

Users: Who else was there, and what role did they play in making it a positive or negative experience?

It is not often that Savannah’s friends and family can attend her speaking gigs. But she’s spent a lot of time in Auckland lately and, because this event was booked so far in advance, many of her friends were able to make it. This made this gig particularly special for her.

The upshot

Zooming in on this experience with the AEIOU method allowed Savannah to see how much her friends and family really make a difference when she’s presenting. She also became aware that, while she is often lonely on the road, she draws energy from building deeper relationships with people in the cities she visits all over the world. She can apply this knowledge by making sure to book her return flights on business trips a day later, so that she can stick around after giving a presentation to mingle and have informal conversations with the people she meets rather than rush off to the airport.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of the AEIOU method, start logging the activities that punctuate your days. The more detailed your reflections, the more insightful they will be. Push beyond “Staff meeting left me feeling great” and aim for more “Presenting at the staff meeting gave me energy and increased my sense of purpose at the office.” “Filing expense report was annoying” might become “Entered business expenses into Excel, which always takes longer than I think that it should.”

Start with a few easy and weekly engagements. Did you exercise this week? How did you feel while you were working out, and afterward? Did answering emails in the evening help you feel more prepared for the next day, or did it only make you more stressed?

Write these down in a notebook. This is where you’ll track the things you do daily. Carve out some time weekly or bi-monthly where you can page back through the entries and look for patterns.

And continue challenging yourself to be more granular and deep in the activities you log, noting what surprises you. For example, you might discover that you’re in a particularly good mood after taking your dog for the nightly walk, and start incorporating a long stroll into your workday in order to make more space for solo contemplation. Or you might find that you’re especially cheerful after grabbing lunch with a particular coworker, and schedule a regular weekly catch-up session.

When you identify the tasks that suck your energy—your daily commute, for example, or paying bills—experiment with ways to minimize the impact on your mood. Perhaps setting up auto-bill pay can relieve a significant amount of stress from your life, or listening to Jane Austen’s repertoire via audiobook on your way to work will help you get through your car rides. These are the kinds of changes that go hand in hand with designing a well-built, joyful life.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans are the authors of Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life and teach in the design program at Stanford University. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Albert Einstein on Sifting the Essential from the Non-Essential

by biographical memoir, farnamstreetblog.com
December 17, 2014

Charlie Munger once said: “We have a passion for keeping things simple."

Einstein says, “I soon learned to scent out what was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind." Most of us try to consume more information, thinking it will lead to more signal, without thinking about how we filter and how we process the information coming in.

Knowing some basic principles helps as does knowing how to combine them. As Einstein says “A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability."

It wasn’t because he understood more about the complicated than other people, as John Wheeler points out in his short on Einstein:

Many a man in the street thinks of Einstein as a man who could only make headway in his work by dint of pages of complicated mathematics; the truth is the direct opposite. As Hilbert put it, “Every boy in the streets of our mathematical Gottingen understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein. Yet, despite that, Einstein did the work and not the mathematicians." Time and again, in the photoelectric effect, in relativity, in gravitation, the amateur grasped the simple point that had eluded the expert.

Where did Einstein acquire this ability to sift the essential from the non-essential? For this we turn to his first job.

In the view of many, the position of clerk of the Swiss patent office was no proper job at all, but it was the best job available to anyone with (Einstein’s) unpromising university record. He served in the Bern office for seven years, from June 23, 1902 to July 6, 1909. Every morning he faced his quote of patent applications. Those were the days when a patent application had to be accompanied by a working model. Over and above the applications and the models was the boss, a kind man, a strict man, a wise man. He gave strict instructions: explain very briefly, if possible in a single sentence, why the device will work or why it won’t; why the application should be granted or why it should be denied.

Day after day Einstein had to distill the central lesson out of objects of the greatest variety that man has power to invent. Who knows a more marvelous way to acquire a sense of what physics is and how it works? It is no wonder that Einstein always delighted in the machinery of the physical world—from the action of a compass needle to the meandering of a river, and from the perversities of a gyroscope to the drive of Flettner’s rotor ship.

Who else but a patent clerk could have discovered the theory of relativity? “Who else," Wheeler writes, “could have distilled this simple central point from all the clutter of electromagnetism than someone whose job it was over and over to extract simplicity out of complexity."

Charles Munger speaks to the importance of sifting folly.

Part of that (possessing uncommon sense), I think, is being able to tune out folly, as distinguished from recognizing wisdom. You’ve got whole categories of things you just bat away so your brain isn’t cluttered with them. That way, you’re better able to pick up a few sensible things to do.

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Everything All At Once
I’m not one to get overwhelmed. I know how to prioritize, how to make sense of the world swirling around me. I know how to take a step back, slow down, and formulate a plan so I can crush anything in my way.

I approach obstacles like a whack-a-mole arcade game, batting down each one as it arises. It’s like a fight scene in a cheesy superhero movie — the hero battles the villains one-by-one until all are incapacitated. But life isn’t like that. It’s not as clean and simplified as an arcade game or a choreographed melee. What happens when multiple moles begin popping up at the same time? Or when a bunch of enemies attack simultaneously?

What happens when everything — the good and the bad — seems to be happening all at once?

It’s funny. Things stay quiet for so long, I sort of get used to the silence. On the career front, on the #sidehustle front, on the romance front — I become accustomed to the lack of movement around me. I’d hate to call it stagnancy because that’s not what it is. Everything around me might be still for a while, but I keep moving, working toward whatever it is I’ve been working toward.

But then the circumstances change. The script flips and suddenly, there’s a girl, there’s a strange dude hitting on me via Facebook Messenger, there’s a slew of strange numbers calling my phone, and there’s a Gmail inbox full of requests for freelance work and responses to job applications.

So I take a step back, thinking, Where did all of this come from? Why now?

The answer is simple, really: There is no answer. There is no single explanation that makes sense. Many describe it as “feast or famine." When it’s famine, I don’t really think about it. I kind of just brush it off as a rut and say, “Nothing’s comin’ up Ryan." But when things pick up — especially after such a long silence — it’s hard to ignore. Feast is overwhelming. And for someone who isn’t easily overwhelmed, I find myself choosing my actions very carefully.

There’s only so much Ryan to go around. My energy is finite, so I need to make sure I’m using it in the right places — and on the right people. I don’t want to scare away the girl, I don’t want to lose the clients, I don’t want to miss out on the big job opportunity. (The Facebook creeper, I can do without.) But how do I keep my cool with so many different things going on?

I recently turned down a job at a well-known company. The opportunity seemed too good to be true at first, as many things do. But after taking some time to think it over, I realized it wasn’t worth pursuing at this point. Factoring in all of the elements — more money but non-permanent employment, no benefits or health insurance, no paid vacation days, and a commute that would’ve worn me down after a month — I knew I had to decline the offer. Basically, I’d be working for a Fortune 15 company without any of the perks of working for a Fortune 15 company. (Would look great on the résumé, though.)

I took a step back and made an adult decision, because that’s what you have to do when everything’s happening all at once: Clear your head and focus on one thing at a time. Analyze it from multiple angles without overthinking it, somehow.

I can’t do everything. I can’t make everyone happy. But I can do anything, and I can make myself happy.
I have a lot of interests and hobbies, some of which manifest themselves in side projects. I am most comfortable when I can focus on one project at a time and see it through to completion. When too many things are going on at once, I get stressed because I know I have limited bandwidth. Time is also a dwindling resource. Something eventually has to give.

But I want it all. I want to finish these projects I’ve assigned to myself, while maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with the important people in my life. I want to write, exercise, play, strum, laugh, act, edit, watch, listen, do, create. And I want support from friends and loved ones to pursue all of these things, but I know I need to be realistic.

I can’t do everything. I can’t make everyone happy. But I can do anything, and I can make myself happy.

Coming to grips with the fact that I can’t have it all is usually the first step in my process of calming down. For the second step, I have adopted a new motto. When things seem to be getting out of control, I repeat to myself:

It’s fiiiiiiine.
This helps me make light of any situation, lessening the metaphorical weight on my shoulders. When I was younger, I used to take things way too seriously. It got to the point where some of my elementary school teachers mentioned to my mom, “Your son is always so serious." I try not to overcompensate now, but sometimes I find it hard to take certain situations seriously. This is why my default understanding of circumstances is often that everything will be fiiiiiiine.

And more often than not, it is.


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Obviously, we all want to be happier. But there's another reason to wish to be more lighthearted and content: Happiness is definitely a result, but happiness is also a driver.

While I'm definitely into finding ways to improve personal productivity (whether a one-day burst of output, or a lifetime of increased effectiveness, or things you should not do every day), probably the best way to be more productive is to just be happier.

Happy people accomplish more.

Easier said than done though, right?

Actually, many changes are easy. Here are 11 science-based ways to be happier from Belle Beth Cooper, co-founder of Hello Code, which makes Exist, a cool app that connects all of your services to turn that data into insights about your life.

Here's Belle Beth:

1. Smile more.

Smiling can make us feel better, but it's more effective when we back it up with positive thoughts, according to this study:

"A new study led by a Michigan State University business scholar suggests customer-service workers who fake smile throughout the day worsen their mood and withdraw from work, affecting productivity. But workers who smile as a result of cultivating positive thoughts--such as a tropical vacation or a child's recital--improve their mood and withdraw less."

Of course, it's important to practice "real smiles" where you use your eye sockets. (You've seen fake smiles that don't reach the person's eyes. Try it. Smile with just your mouth. Then smile naturally; your eyes narrow. There's a huge difference between a fake smile and a genuine smile.)

According to PsyBlog, smiling can improve our attention and help us perform better on cognitive tasks:

"Smiling makes us feel good, which also increases our attentional flexibility and our ability to think holistically. When this idea was tested by Johnson et al (2010), the results showed that participants who smiled performed better on attentional tasks which required seeing the whole forest rather than just the trees."

A smile is also a good way to reduce some of the pain we feel in troubling circumstances:

"Smiling is one way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting situation. Psychologists call this the facial feedback hypothesis. Even forcing a smile when we don't feel like it is enough to lift our mood slightly (this is one example of embodied cognition)."

2. Exercise for seven minutes.

Think exercise is something you don't have time for? Think again. Check out this seven-minute workout from The New York Times. That's a workout any of us can fit into our schedules.

Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it is an effective strategy for overcoming depression. In a study cited in Shawn Achor's book The Happiness Advantage, three groups of patients treated their depression with medication, exercise, or a combination of the two.

The results of this study are surprising: Although all three groups experienced similar improvements in their happiness levels early on, the follow-up assessments proved to be radically different:

"The groups were tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent."

You don't have to be depressed to benefit from exercise, though. Exercise can help you relax, increase your brainpower, and even improve your body image, even if you don't lose any weight.

We've explored exercise in depth before, and looked at what it does to our brains, such as releasing proteins and endorphins that make us feel happier.

A study in the Journal of Health Psychology found that people who exercised felt better about their bodies even when they saw no physical changes:

"Body weight, shape and body image were assessed in 16 males and 18 females before and after both 6 x 40 minutes exercising and 6 x 40 minutes reading. Over both conditions, body weight and shape did not change. Various aspects of body image, however, improved after exercise compared to before."

Yep: Even if your actual appearance doesn't change, how you feel about your body does change.

3. Sleep more.

We know that sleep helps our body recover from the day and repair itself and that it helps us focus and be more productive. It turns out sleep is also important for happiness.

In NutureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explain how sleep affects positivity:

"Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.

"In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81 percent of the words with a negative connotation, like cancer. But they could remember only 31 percent of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like sunshine or basket."

The BPS Research Digest explores another study that proves sleep affects our sensitivity to negative emotions. Using a facial recognition task throughout the course of a day, researchers studied how sensitive participants were to positive and negative emotions. Those who worked through the afternoon without taking a nap became more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and anger.

"Using a face recognition task, here we demonstrate an amplified reactivity to anger and fear emotions across the day, without sleep. However, an intervening nap blocked and even reversed this negative emotional reactivity to anger and fear while conversely enhancing ratings of positive (happy) expressions."

Of course, how well (and how long) you sleep will probably affect how you feel when you wake up, which can make a difference to your whole day.

Another study tested how employees' moods when they started work in the morning affected their entire workday.

"Researchers found that employees' moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers' moods."

And, most important to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on performance, including both how much work employees performed and how well they performed it.

4. Spend more time with friends and family.

Not staying in touch with friends and family is one of the top five regrets of the dying.

If you want more evidence that time with friends is beneficial for you, research proves it can make you happier right now, too.

Social time is highly valuable when it comes to improving our happiness, even for introverts. Several studies have found that time spent with friends and family makes a big difference in how happy we feel.

I love the way Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert explains it:

"We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends."

George Vaillant is the director of a 72-year study of the lives of 268 men.

"In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, 'What have you learned from the Grant Study men?' Vaillant's response: 'That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.'"

He shared insights of the study with Joshua Wolf Shenk at The Atlantic on how men's social connections made a difference to their overall happiness:

"Men's relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger."

In fact, a study published in the Journal of Socio-Economics states than your relationships are worth more than $100,000:

"Using the British Household Panel Survey, I find that an increase in the level of social involvements is worth up to an extra 85,000 a year in terms of life satisfaction. Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness."

I think that last line is especially fascinating: "Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness." So we could increase our annual income by hundreds of thousands of dollars and still not be as happy as we would if we increased the strength of our social relationships.

The Terman study, covered in The Longevity Project, found that relationships and how we help others were important factors in living long, happy lives:

"We figured that if a Terman participant sincerely felt that he or she had friends and relatives to count on when having a hard time then that person would be healthier. Those who felt very loved and cared for, we predicted, would live the longest.

"Surprise: Our prediction was wrong ... Beyond social network size, the clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others. Those who helped their friends and neighbors, advising and caring for others, tended to live to old age."

5. Go outside more often.

In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor recommends spending time in the fresh air to improve your happiness:

"Making time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge advantage; one study found that spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosted positive mood, but broadened thinking and improved working memory ... "

This is good news for those of us who worry about fitting new habits into already busy schedules. Twenty minutes is a short enough time to spend outside that you could fit it into your commute or even your lunch break.

A U.K. study from the University of Sussex also found that being outdoors made people happier:

"Being outdoors, near the sea, on a warm, sunny weekend afternoon is the perfect spot for most. In fact, participants were found to be substantially happier outdoors in all natural environments than they were in urban environments."

The American Meteorological Society published research in 2011 that found current temperature has a bigger effect on our happiness than variables like wind speed and humidity, or even the average temperature over the course of a day. It also found that happiness is maximized at 57 degrees (13.9C), so keep an eye on the weather forecast before heading outside for your 20 minutes of fresh air.

The connection between productivity and temperature is another topic we've talked about more here. It's fascinating what a small change in temperature can do.

6. Help other people.

One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I found is that to make yourself feel happier, you should help others. In fact, 100 hours per year (or two hours per week) is the optimal time we should dedicate to helping others in order to enrich our lives.

If we go back to Shawn Achor's book again, he says this about helping others:

" ... when researchers interviewed more than 150 people about their recent purchases, they found that money spent on activities--such as concerts and group dinners out--brought far more pleasure than material purchases like shoes, televisions, or expensive watches. Spending money on other people, called 'prosocial spending,' also boosts happiness."

The Journal of Happiness Studies published a study that explored this very topic:

"Participants recalled a previous purchase made for either themselves or someone else and then reported their happiness. Afterward, participants chose whether to spend a monetary windfall on themselves or someone else. Participants assigned to recall a purchase made for someone else reported feeling significantly happier immediately after this recollection; most importantly, the happier participants felt, the more likely they were to choose to spend a windfall on someone else in the near future."

So spending money on other people makes us happier than buying stuff for ourselves. But what about spending our time on other people?

A study of volunteering in Germany explored how volunteers were affected when their opportunities to help others were taken away:

"Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the German reunion, the first wave of data of the GSOEP was collected in East Germany. Volunteering was still widespread. Due to the shock of the reunion, a large portion of the infrastructure of volunteering (e.g., sports clubs associated with firms) collapsed and people randomly lost their opportunities for volunteering. Based on a comparison of the change in subjective well-being of these people and of people from the control group who had no change in their volunteer status, the hypothesis is supported that volunteering is rewarding in terms of higher life satisfaction."

In his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman explains that helping others can improve our own lives:

" ... we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested."

7. Plan a trip (even if you don't ever take it).

As opposed to actually taking a holiday, simply planning a vacation or break from work can improve our happiness. A study published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life showed that the highest spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as people enjoy the sense of anticipation:

"In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks. After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people."

Shawn Achor has some info for us on this point, as well:

"One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent."

If you can't take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with friends, put something on the calendar--even if it's a month or a year down the road.

Then, whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it.

8. Meditate.

Meditation is often touted as an important habit for improving focus, clarity, and attention span, as well as helping to keep you calm. It turns out it's also useful for improving your happiness:

"In one study, a research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the brain scans of 16 people before and after they participated in an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation. The study, published in the January issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the course, parts of the participants' brains associated with compassion and self-awareness grew, and parts associated with stress shrank."

Meditation literally clears your mind and calms you down. It's often been proved to be the single most effective way to live a happier life. According to Achor, meditation can actually make you happier long-term:

"Studies show that in the minutes right after meditating, we experience feelings of calm and contentment, as well as heightened awareness and empathy. And research even shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise levels of happiness."

The fact that we can actually alter our brain structure through meditation is most surprising to me and somewhat reassuring that however we feel and think today isn't permanent.

(For more on the subject, here's what happened when I (Jeff) decided to try meditation.)

9. Move closer to work.

Our commute to work can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The fact that we tend to commute twice a day at least five days a week makes it unsurprising that the effect would build up over time and make us less and less happy.

According to the Art of Manliness, having a long commute is something we often fail to realize will affect us so dramatically:

" ... while many voluntary conditions don't affect our happiness in the long term because we acclimate to them, people never get accustomed to their daily slog to work because sometimes the traffic is awful and sometimes it's not."

Or as Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it, "Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day."

We tend to try to compensate for this by having a bigger house or a better job, but these compensations just don't work:

"Two Swiss economists who studied the effect of commuting on happiness found that such factors could not make up for the misery created by a long commute."

10. Practice gratitude.

This is a seemingly simple strategy, but one I've found to make a huge difference to my outlook. There are lots of ways to practice gratitude, from keeping a journal of things you're grateful for, sharing three good things that happen each day with a friend or your partner, or going out of your way to show gratitude when others help you.

In an experiment where participants took note of things they were grateful for each day, their moods were improved just from this simple practice:

"The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the three studies, relative to the comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits."

The Journal of Happiness Studies published a study that used letters of gratitude to test how being grateful can affect our levels of happiness:

"Participants included 219 men and women who wrote three letters of gratitude over a three-week period. Results indicated that writing letters of gratitude increased participants' happiness and life satisfaction while decreasing depressive symptoms."

11. And the easiest tip of all: get older.

As we get older, particularly past middle age, we tend to naturally grow happier. There's still some debate over why this happens, but scientists have a few ideas:

"Researchers, including the authors, have found that older people shown pictures of faces or situations tend to focus on and remember the happier ones more and the negative ones less."

Other studies have discovered that as people age, they seek out situations that will lift their moods--for instance, pruning social circles of friends or acquaintances who might bring them down. Still other work finds that older adults learn to let go of loss and disappointment over unachieved goals, and focus their goals on greater well-being.

So if you thought getting old will make you miserable, it's likely you'll develop a more positive outlook than you probably have now.

How cool is that?

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by Mark Manson, markmanson.net
July 28, 2016
In the past year, despite hundreds of people asking me, I’m proud to say that I’ve managed to avoid all temptation to write an article about Donald Trump or the slow motion, 20-car pileup that is this year’s US presidential election.

Until now.

Before, I stayed out of the gravitational pull of Trump’s narcissistic publicity machine for a few reasons:

There’s already so much stuff out there about him and how terrifying he is as a presidential candidate, I never felt like there was anything I could say that wasn’t already being said by somebody smarter or more informed than me.
The guy doesn’t need any more attention or publicity. Seriously, fuck him.
But most importantly:

Trump is an effect, not a cause. You don’t get a major party nomination off your own merits; you get there because you’re able to represent and channel millions of people’s thoughts and feelings. There is a putrid stench fermenting just beneath the surface of 21st-century society, and it birthed Trump, not the other way around. Nothing about the man himself is particularly unique or noteworthy, in my opinion.1
So I just avoided the topic altogether. I try to stay away from politics on this site and write about more universal themes.

But then the other night, I dabbled in watching the Republican National Convention the same way a child might dabble with trying out mom’s cigarettes or a college girlfriend might dabble in trying out anal sex — with an innocent curiosity that was quickly overwhelmed by shock, horror, and intense pain.

What struck me the most was this constant narrative that somehow the world has become this insane and dangerous place and we need somebody to take charge and make everything “safe" and “secure" for us again. At one point there was even a gigantic projection of the words, “Make America Safe Again" at the back of the stage.

Safe from what?

Too much college education? From less teenage pregnancy? Seriously, I was dumbfounded — safe from what? What the hell do we need to be made safe from?

Violent crime is at an all-time low, international wars are at an all-time low, there have been precipitous drops in domestic violence, steady declines in drunk driving-related deaths, death from infectious diseases and a rock-bottom child mortality rate. You’re more likely to be killed by a piece of furniture than by a terrorist attack.

So, I’m seriously asking, keep us safe from what?

I’m not just shitting on Republicans here, either. This sense of insecurity seems to be universal, even if couched in different language. Hillary has talked about the need to escalate the war on terror in order to protect us — an oxymoron for anyone who has been awake the last 15 years.2 In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Lesley Stahl, while interviewing Trump and Mike Pence, said, “I don’t remember the last time we’ve seen a world in this much chaos," to which both candidates quickly agreed.

So wait, just in my lifetime, I’ve seen: two foreign invasions and four wars, half a dozen Middle Eastern governments toppled, 9/11, two stock market crashes and the worst global recession in the last 85 years, a genocide in Europe, the Berlin wall falling, the end of the Soviet bloc, and one OJ Simpson car chase — yet these people think now is the most chaotic and dangerous time in recent memory?

And this is coming from one of the highest profile journalists on the planet.

It seems these days that there is this omnipresent feeling that the world is going fucking crazy. Yet, by every objective measurement, it’s arguably the sanest and safest it’s been in recorded history.3

Because, like you, like seemingly everybody, I have also felt as though the world is spinning out of control and there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m exhausted from all the stories of shootings and attacks and bombs and the constant stream of awful stuff that is happening out there. I, too, feel desensitized and dejected from the seemingly constant carnage raging across the planet.

And because this feeling is new and unique to me, my first assumption is that the world must be more fucked than it’s ever been before. After all, I never felt this way 10 years ago or 20 years ago. So things must be worse, right?

But the world isn’t worse. It’s just that we’re more aware of all of the bad things than ever before. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it: “The violence is not new; it’s the cameras that are new."

Cameras, the internet, and most importantly, social media. This is what’s new. This is what’s different. How we’re getting information, what information is reaching us, and most importantly, what information and views we are most rewarded for sharing.

In the attention economy, people are rewarded for extremism. They are rewarded for indulging their worst biases and stoking other people’s worst fears. They are rewarded for portraying the world as a place that is burning to the ground, whether it’s because of gay marriage, or police violence, or Islamic terrorism, or low interest rates. The internet has generated a platform where apocalyptic beliefs are celebrated and spread, and moderation and reason is something that becomes too arduous and boring to stand.

And this constant awareness of every fault and flaw of our humanity, combined with an inundation of doomsayers and narcissistic nihilists commanding our attention space, is what is causing this constant feeling of a chaotic and insecure world that doesn’t actually exist.

And then: it’s this feeling that is the cause of the renewed xenophobia and nationalism across the western world. It’s this feeling of insecurity and chaos that is igniting the platforms of divisive strong-men like Trump, Erdogan, and Putin. It’s this feeling that has consumed the consciousness of millions of people, and caused them to look at their country through the lens of a fun-house mirror: exaggerating all that is wrong and minimizing all that is right.


And this is what disturbs me: the fact that people today, despite living with more safety and wealth and access to information than anyone in human history, feel as though the world is going crazy and something drastic must be changed.

But really it’s not just them. It’s us. We are going crazy. Each one of us, individually, capsized in the flood of negativity, we are ready to burn down the very structures on which the most successful civilizations in human history have been built.

But why? How did this happen? And how can we stop it?

The Hidden Dangers of a ‘Global Community’

By now, we’re all familiar with the tech world circle-jerk about how we’re connecting the planet and the world is getting smaller and we’re all becoming one big kumbaya global community and how this is amazing because starving babies in Mozambique and Suriname can each have their own iPad, and blah, blah, blah, the internet is cool.

And don’t get me wrong, the rise of the internet and social media has accelerated social progress in many ways. It’s helped herald a breakthrough in LGBT rights, it’s raised awareness about discrimination against women and minorities, and fomented the populist overthrow of a number of repressive governments worldwide.4

In one sense, we are becoming a global community by the sheer fact that so much information can be instantly connected to everyone else across the globe. And one benefit of this connectivity that we’ve seen is that if a black man is unjustly killed in Baltimore or if a rapist gets off with no punishment in Ohio, activists and concerned citizens can quickly mobilize to spread the word and hold the appropriate authorities accountable for change.

The fuel of this mobilization, of course, is outrage.

Outrageous news and information spread faster and further than any other form of information, dominating our daily attention. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, we become aware of some of the grossest injustices in our society as soon as they happen. On the other hand, all we hear about are the grossest injustices in our society as soon as they happen.

I don’t know the name of the governor of my state, but I know all about the false claims and lies of the Brexit ‘Leave’ campaign. I couldn’t tell you what the latest breakthrough in cancer research is or what the education system in my community is doing to improve life here, but I know what the Orlando shooter’s neighbors and wife thought about him. I couldn’t tell you who is running for congress in my district, but I do know that some gun rights activist in Texas murdered two of her own daughters in the street over a petty family argument.

This is our brave new world. When all information is freely available at the click of a mouse, our attention naturally nosedives in the sickest and most grotesque we can find. And the sickest and most grotesque similarly finds its way to the top of the nation’s consciousness, dominating our attention and the news cycle, dividing and recruiting us into its ever more polarized camps.

We become only exposed to the most extreme negative aspects of certain groups of people, giving us a skewed view of how other people in the world really think, act, and live. When we are exposed to police, we only see the worst 0.1% of police. When we are exposed to poor African Americans, we’re only exposed to the worst 0.1% of poor African Americans. When we’re exposed to Muslim immigrants, we only hear about the worst 0.1% of Muslim immigrants. When we are exposed to chauvinist, shitty white men, we’re only exposed to the worst 0.1%, and when we’re exposed to angry and entitled social justice warriors, we’re only exposed to the worst 0.1%.


We’ve all seen dozens of photos like this on the internet, while people like this probably make up 1/10000th of the population.
As a result, it feels as though everyone is an angry fucking extremist and is full of hate and violence and the world is coming undone thread by thread, when the truth is that most of the population occupies a silent middle ground and is actually probably not in so much disagreement with one another.5
We demonize each other. We judge groups of people by their weakest and most depraved members. And to protect ourselves from the overreaching judgments of others, we consolidate into our own clans and tribes, we take refuge in our own precious identity politics and we buy more and more into a worldview that is disconnected from cold data and hard facts.

It’s for this reason that I’ve started to remove myself from digesting news and information through social media. I’ve refrained from the small petty arguments and “gotcha" pieces and “Ohmigerd, did you see what this random guy in California did?"

The only way to beat the attention economy is to opt out of it. This is no longer about wasting time on Pokemon Go or refreshing Facebook 12 times a day. It’s no longer about email killing productivity at work or kids not being able to pay attention at school. It’s now creeping into our political system, and I fear there could be irreparable damage done to it.

Instead, I am attempting to go back to learning about the world only through long-form journalism that has been thoroughly researched and vetted before being published. I’m exercising the muscles in my brain responsible for focus, depth, and concentration. I’m stretching out my logic, trying to challenge my own beliefs and always holding on to a healthy amount of doubt.

Is this far less convenient and way more time consuming? Yes, it is. Does it make me feel like a cranky old man to all my friends? Yeah, it does.

But it’s the only way.

It’s the only way I can prevent myself from going crazy, to keep myself tethered to reality as it is, not to reality how it feels.

Freedom is not free

There’s a common saying in the US that “Freedom is not free." The saying is usually used in reference to the wars fought and won (or lost) to protect the values of the country. It’s a way of reminding people that, hey, this didn’t just magically happen; thousands of people were killed and/or died for us to sit here and sip over-priced mocha frappuccinos and say whatever the fuck we want.

And it’s true.6

The idea is that the basic human rights we enjoy — free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press — were earned through the sacrifice against some external force, some evil threat.

But people have seemed to conveniently forget that freedom is earned through internal sacrifices as well. Freedom can only exist when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you’re willing to give up some of your desires for the sake of a safe and healthy community, when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way and that’s fine.


In a weird sense, true freedom doesn’t exist. Because the only way for human rights to persist is for everyone to collectively agree to accept that things don’t have to go their way 100% of the time.

But the last couple decades, I fear that people have confused freedom with a lack of discomfort. They have forgotten about that necessary internal struggle.

They want a freedom to express themselves but they don’t want to have to deal with views that may upset or offend them in some way. They want a freedom to enterprise but they don’t want to pay taxes to support the legal machinery that makes it possible. They want a freedom to elect representatives to government but they don’t want to compromise when they’re on the losing side.

A free and functioning democracy demands a populace that is able to sustain discomfort, that is able to tolerate dissatisfaction, that is able to be charitable and forgiving of groups whose views stand in contrast to one’s own, and most importantly, that is able to remain unswayed in the face of some violent threat.

What I fear we’re seeing now is a loss of that ability to handle discomfort and dissatisfaction. We’re seeing a lazy entitlement wash over the world where everyone feels as though they deserve what they want from their government the second they want it, without thought of repercussions or the rest of the population.

Or as one Reddit comment sadly put it recently, “It seems like people don’t actually want democracy anymore, they want a dictator who agrees with them."

But this constant state of mild dissatisfaction — this is what freedom actually tastes like. And if people continue to lose their ability to stomach it, then I fear one day it will be gone.

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