I’ve said this to other people before when trying to counsel them regarding difficult decisions.
Does what you are doing ultimately make you happy? Strip away everything else, every other factor. Especially those that involve others. Narrow it down to this one thing: the pursuit of your own happiness. At the end of the day, your own happiness is very literally the only point to anything. We get one life to live. If you’re doing something that isn’t pushing you to be happier, what are you doing? Why do it? What purpose is served by being unhappy?
Certainly not every individual action will make us happy, but I think it makes sense to really assess whether our choices and paths are building towards something that will increase our happiness, and strongly consider dropping things that do not.
Of course the catch is that this simple advice is quite difficult to enact. Assessing whether something contributes to your happiness requires a level of self understanding and introspection that people may not be comfortable with. But that journey is part of the process, IMO.
I’ve said this to other people before when trying to counsel them regarding difficult decisions.
Does what you are doing ultimately make you happy? Strip away everything else, every other factor. Especially those that involve others. Narrow it down to this one thing: the pursuit of your own happiness. At the end of the day, your own happiness is very literally the only point to anything. We get one life to live. If you’re doing something that isn’t pushing you to be happier, what are you doing? Why do it? What purpose is served by being unhappy?
Certainly not every individual action will make us happy, but I think it makes sense to really assess whether our choices and paths are building towards something that will increase our happiness, and strongly consider dropping things that do not.
Of course the catch is that this simple advice is quite difficult to enact. Assessing whether something contributes to your happiness requires a level of self understanding and introspection that people may not be comfortable with. But that journey is part of the process, IMO.