Solve For Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy

by Mo Gawdat

Have you ever searched for your keys only to realize they were in your pocket all along? Remember how you removed everything from your desk, searched beneath the couch, and got more and more frustrated the longer they went missing? We do the same thing when we struggle to find happiness “out there,” when, in fact, happiness is right where it’s always been: inside us, a basic design feature of our species.

For human beings, simply put, the default state is happiness.

Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.

Happiness is your default state.

Success is not an essential prerequisite to happiness.

But once your income reaches the average annual income per capita, which in the United States today is about $70,000, subjective well-being plateaus.

While success doesn’t lead to happiness, happiness does contribute to success.

Happiness happens when life seems to be going your way. You feel happy when life behaves the way you want it to. Not surprisingly, the opposite is also true: Unhappiness happens when your reality does not match your hopes and expectations.

here’s the tricky bit: it’s not the event that makes us unhappy; it’s the way we think about it that does.

It’s the thought, not the actual event, that’s making you unhappy.

If events remain as they are, but changing the way we think about them changes our experience of them, could we become happy simply by changing our thoughts?

As much as we hate it, pain and the discomforts of life are useful!

All the thinking in the world, until converted into action, has no impact on the reality of our lives.

Suffering offers no benefit whatsoever. None!

Happiness starts with a conscious choice.

Often what feels like happiness actually isn’t! We can miss the distinction between happiness and fun. We swap out true happiness for weapons of mass distraction: partying, drinking, eating, excessive shopping, or compulsive sex.

Fun is an effective painkiller because it mimics happiness by switching off the incessant thinking that overwhelms our brains—for a while.

With no thoughts, we return to our default, childlike, state: happiness!

A wise use for fun is as an emergency off switch to allow for momentary intervals of peace so that you can get the voice in your head to chill, meanwhile interjecting some reason into the endless stream of chatter.

Fun, then, can be less like a numbing painkiller and more like a happiness supplement that you take regularly to stay healthy.

They are like the artists and writers—and engineers—psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about, who are so in harmony with the present moment that they enter a realm of timeless bliss he calls “flow”—only they flow with every tiny thing that life throws their way, whatever it is. They reach a state of uninterrupted happiness that I’ve come to call joy.1

If fun suspends your thoughts, and happiness arises when your brain agrees with the events of your life, then joy is when thoughts are no longer even needed because the analysis has ended, and the equation has permanently been solved.

True joy is to be in harmony with life exactly as it is.

You should never settle for anything less than joy.

Bust the Grand Illusions Fix the Blind Spots Hang on to the Ultimate Truths

The little voice in your head is not you!

I am, therefore I think.

The more something matters, the more incessant thought will be left out of it.

There are three types of thought that our brains produce: insightful (used for problem solving), experiential (focused on the task at hand), and narrative (chatter).

Your brain can be primed! Simple as this might seem, this is a powerful loophole in your brain’s thought cycles.

Remove the unhappy thought, replace it with a happy one, and let the rest take care of itself.

Instead of trying to think about not being at a job you dislike, think about being in another job altogether.

Happiness is always found in the positive side of every concept.

For the brain, multitasking is a myth!

Learn to shut the duck up.

So much of your happiness depends not on the conditions of the world around you but on the thoughts you create about them. When you learn to calmly observe the dialogue and the drama, you begin to see the ones and zeros. You can watch your thoughts, knowing that the only power they can gain over you is the power you grant them.

You are not the voice in your head.

The illusion starts with a belief that you are your physical form. A layer deeper, you identify with a persona that is nothing like you (your ego), and then, at the deepest layer, you get deluded about your place in the world.

Then you’ll keep shedding layers until you reach the one that’s solid and real, the one that will withstand the tests of perception and permanence.

You are not your body!

You are the observer.

You are the one who sees.

The fact that you can’t comprehend your true nature doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The depth of the ocean, the ubiquity of radio waves, and the smell of cookies all exist regardless of your capabilities to fully comprehend them.

As we get ahead, some of us invest in brand-name clothing or expensive cars to keep growing our persona. Everything we earn from the persona is spent on maintaining it, but none of it makes us really happy. Yet, we never stop to reconsider what we do as long as it keeps our egos intact.

Why do we try so hard to drink from a fancy cup when all we want is good coffee? If you want to live a stress-free life, he says, ignore the cup and just: Enjoy the coffee.

The egoless child is still calmly sitting inside each of us. Buried in layers over layers of lies, egos, and personas. Happy nonetheless. Waiting to be found. Let’s find your Pooki.

See how much we put on every day to serve nothing but our ego? See how little is left to carry around if you strip off all the images that you constantly work to maintain? See how light you feel without them?

Disapproving of someone else is the easiest way to feel superior. It doesn’t require the hard work needed to become better. It just requires thinking less of someone else.

Be yourself no matter what they say.

Perhaps the deepest part of the Illusion of Self is the part that causes us the deepest sorrow. It is the part that most often prevents us from solving the Happiness Equation correctly. It begins when you believe that you are the center of the universe, that good things happen because you’ve earned them and bad things happen just to annoy you. And that’s the furthest thing from the truth.