Contentment, bliss, over the moon, merriment, joy, delight, elation, glee, euphoria, pleasure, ecstasy, well-being, prosperity, that which separates a good life from one of misery.… HAPPINESS.
But, what is true happiness? It’s everything if you don’t have it, right?
Happiness has always been the goal
Happiness, or the lack thereof rather, can be connected to every war ever fought, every murder ever committed, and every drug addiction ever encountered. Deep down, happiness is what we are all seeking to obtain and maintain. Not money, not fame, not prestige. We are, and have always been, a species continuously in the pursuit of happiness. This continuous pursuit of happiness was important enough that our Founding Fathers decided to include a verbal clause in the Declaration of Independence about it.
There is no question that the search for happiness is, and always has been, an integral part of our daily lives.
The bigger question is, why have we had such a difficult time solving our happiness woes? Why haven’t we conquered our quest to obtain and maintain happiness for all?
We’ve unlocked the secrets to eradicate deadly and debilitating sickness that would decimate the human population as we know it. We’ve figured out how to launch a human into outer space, land on a rock 238,900 miles away, and safely return to earth without a scratch. Yet, we can’t seem to solve our happiness conundrum. In fact, as a society we are actually further away from our goal as ever before.
The problem when evaluating our global happiness levels is that it’s a difficult metric to track. For one, every language describes happiness in a different way, another reason is that there is no clinical diagnosis for happiness. You can’t simply go to your family doctor and be diagnosed as being in a state of happiness. You have to look at the opposite of happiness and work backward. The best way to see how far we have strayed from being in a happy state as a society is through the diagnosis of depression.
We are losing the fight against depression
In the United States, over 18 million adults suffer from depression in any given year. Depression is the leading cause of disability for people ages 15-44 and accounts for $23 billion in lost workdays each year. It is one of the most debilitating conditions in the world, with severe depression rated in the same disability category as terminal stage cancer. According to the U.S Centers for disease control and prevention behavioral risk surveillance system (BRFSS) 1 in 6 Americans take a psychiatric drug and greater than 30 million Americans are on antidepressant medication.
We’re more depressed than we’ve ever been and yet we spend more money trying to fix our happiness problems than ever before. In 2020 it was estimated that Americans spent $10.5 billion on self-improvement and is forecasted to grow to $14.0 billion by 2025. You would think with the billions spent on trying to fix our happiness that we would eventually see a decrease in depression and anxiety. Sadly, the opposite is true. The more we learn and the more we seek after happiness the deeper we dive into despair, and the further we stray from global happiness.
Now, what does all this suggest, that our future is doomed? That our right to the pursuit of happiness has been revoked? Does it mean that we are all on a downward spiral towards an imminent depressive state? You wouldn’t be sitting there reading this if the latter were true. Luckily there is still time to turn this boat around and start making gains in the categories of global happiness and overall contentment, but it’s not going to be easy. And quite frankly that’s the whole point of the happiness trifecta.
You see, most people have a fundamentally flawed view of what happiness is and an even more flawed view about how to obtain it. It’s not our fault really. We’ve been slowly coerced into believing a false definition of happiness and given the wrong map to find it.
- Is happiness a choice, a mindset shift, or can it be bought?
- Is happiness sent down from the heavens through communion with the divine?
- Do we slowly, softly, entice happiness into our lives through meditation?
- Is it something that’s found during a weekend course or simply reading a book?
- Is happiness peace and contentment, or is it euphoria and ecstasy?
- Is it light and fluffy like a newborn kitten?
A new definition for happiness
Let me propose another definition for happiness, a definition that has been hidden in plain sight for thousands of years, until now. Happiness is dark, deep, dirty, painful, and difficult. True happiness is the opposite of what comes to mind when you think of happiness. It’s not the light and airy fairy, Mr. Rogers kind of happiness that we’ve been sold over time. Deep happiness is the badass biker dude that will bust your upper lip if you look at him crooked. Radical happiness is intense and hard to the core, and it’s time we start treating it with the respect it deserves instead of dressing it up in a flowery Sunday dress.
The secret to obtain this radical, badass, true happiness, and keep it for the long term is directly correlated to the amount of difficulty we commit to and overcome in our life. Happiness is brought about by doing difficult things, taking the long road instead of the easy path, opting for the drudgery instead of the fluffy air-conditioned comfort.
The hard reality is that the amount of happiness we experience in life is not a function of how much money we have, how many cars are in our garage, or how many girls we’ve slept with. It’s not even about how many followers we have on social media. Deep Happiness is about committing to and doing difficult things mentally, physically, and spiritually… every day. That is the trifecta to happiness and that is the secret that nobody will ever tell you because nobody wants to admit that everything we know about happiness is wrong.
Not a new idea
I’m not the first to discover this idea of difficult, deep, and intense happiness. Oh no, it is something that many others have found and have implemented. However, nobody has the guts to step up and reveal something so counterintuitive, something so backward, and something that is not likely to sell to the mainstream masses because it is the hard truth that nobody wants to hear.
Instead of admitting to the hard truths about happiness, we instead think that in today’s advanced human race everything should be easier than it was in the past. I mean come on, we have microwaves and air conditioned cars. We’ve solved those problems by making it easier on us. Why can’t the answer to finding more happiness in our lives be as easy as popping a corn dog in the microwave? We go about with this mentality and dismiss the difficult path as an outdated path that only the cavemen had to withstand and instead look for science and technology to solve our problem.
So what do we do now?
How do we start down the path to regain our right to happiness?
What to do with our new knowledge of happiness
We burn it down, burn it all down. Everything you have previously been taught about happiness, joy, contentment, and success, can be thrown in a big imaginary wooden box, soaked in kerosene, and lit on fire. Yes, the flowery self-help journal in your closet, the poster you have that says something like “you can do anything you put your mind to” bullshit is exactly that… BULLSHIT.
We have been lied to for so long that it’s commonplace to believe that happiness is a choice, or that we can change our attitude by positive thought and or by forcing a smile. Yes, those things can boost our happiness in the short term, similar to a quick shot of energy in the morning from a cup of espresso. But, what happens a few hours after the uptick in energy? We inevitably crash back to baseline levels and sometimes even below where we started in the first place.
Everything we are told and sold about happiness is a short term fix to a long-term problem. We are sold ‘quick and easy’ for a problem that really needs to be solved by ‘long and difficult’. Sadly, quick and easy is what people gravitate towards and spend their hard earned money on. Comfortable is what’s featured in magazines and on television because we, as a society, are all about the quick fix, the fast path to get to where we want to go. The happiness trifecta path to happiness is the opposite. It is the truth about happiness, the hard truth that deep happiness is found by playing the long game. It’s slow and steady, it’s long and intense, but the path that works.
A fresh take on happiness
As you can probably tell by now, this is not your regular old self-help or happiness blog. This is not your mom’s flowery, cheery, quote-filled self-improvement website. The ideas and philosophies found in these articles are about radical and significant change that needs to be made about how we think about happiness and success. This is the self-help website that those with big dreams and bigger aspirations have been waiting for. The nitty-gritty and dirty truth about happiness and success with no fluff and nothing to sell.
The reality is that deep unfiltered happiness, the kind that makes you feel like you could burst out of your skin and do a happy dance, is actually very difficult to achieve. Happiness shouldn’t be easy, neither should success, spirituality, joy, physical fitness, or even contentment. The most valuable things in life should and will be difficult to achieve. That’s the secret, and it has been right in front of our faces for centuries, and nobody wants to admit it. True happiness takes hard work and doing things that others choose not to because of the discomfort involved on the front end, and that’s exactly how it should be. That’s how it was meant to be.
The comfort dilemma
So, why is it so hard to do? Why do we gravitate towards comfort instead of difficulty when we know deep down that the best things in life come about after completing the difficult task. The reason is that we are inundated with lies that life is easy, money is easy, and the comfortable life is the successful life. Everybody wants a 4 hour work week with a 60 hour week salary. Everybody wants the 2-minute abs of steel without feeling the burn, and we are confused when the results don’t develop like the social media influencer, or fitness guru said it would… whelp, bye-bye 200 bucks!
The problem is we live in a day and age where fast, and easy is the expected, and if it doesn’t happen that way then we get upset and request our money back or worse, try and cancel the person that promised success and happiness at the drop of a hat.
We want our food fast, our cars faster, and our women even faster, and we get upset and depressed when we cannot achieve fast happiness. Happiness never was and never will be something that is achieved quickly, and definitely cannot be found at a weekend course and subsequently checked off a list.
Difficulty is the key
To obtain the greatest treasures in life, and to reach the sweetest fruit you have to exert yourself to complete difficult tasks to then reach unimaginable heights. If happiness was so easy to obtain, then why are there so many books, courses, talks, and philosophies about gaining happiness in life? And why are people even more depressed and anxious than at any other time in history? Because people have been taught that happiness should come easily by applying a few simple techniques. And when those techniques don’t work, we then believe that there is something inherently wrong with us. We believe others when they say it should be easy and are frustrated when it’s not. Then the questions start to come pouring in our minds.
- What is happiness?
- What is joy?
- What is contentment?
- What is good and bad?
- What is peace?
- What is pleasure?
These are questions that humans have had since the beginning of time and they’re all questions that we cannot specifically define. They are subjective terms that cannot be dealt with scientifically. That’s why it is so hard to come up with a definitive equation that solves for happiness. Because for everyone happiness has a different definition. For some it’s ecstasy, for others it’s peace, joy, contentment, or just a calm feeling. For the purpose of this blog, we will use many of those same terms interchangeably and will ask you to judge for yourself what it means to have happiness in your life. Try not to get bogged down by the exact definitions and minute details of the verbiage but the overarching theme of each article and the website overall. You can successfully interchange happiness with contentment, joy, peace, bliss, and even pleasure.
Become comfortable with discomfort
The ideas behind the Happiness Trifecta came about by reminiscing on all of the things in my life that have brought me happiness, contentment, and even pure joy. All have come about after some trial, difficulty, intense work, and discipline. Anything that has been gifted to me, or that has been easy to achieve has quickly lost its flavor and fizzled into my past as insignificant. Our happiness and contentment are no different.
We cannot expect the highest degree of significance and happiness to come about in an easy way. The opposite is actually true. The higher the degree of difficulty and sacrifice, the higher the degree of joy. This is true in all aspects of life…parenting, marriage, physical fitness, education, entrepreneurship, minimalism, yoga, meditation, heat therapy, cold therapy, breath-holding, etc, etc. The list goes on and on with examples of difficult paths that then lead to added joy and contentment.
At the end of the day the real decision is not to choose to be happy or depressed. That is impossible and a lie that is being sold to you. You can’t choose happiness. However, what you can do is to choose to go down the path that others forgo because it is scary. You can choose to complete a difficult task that will in turn lead to happiness and contentment.
Go out and do something different than you have always done. Go out and choose difficult, hard, and scary. In turn you will see happiness not as something to pursue, but something that will come knocking at your door as a result of your sacrifice to the pursuit of difficulty.
