Last January, I was not in a good emotional place. To be honest, up to that point I had never really been in a good emotional place, even before the hormonal playground that was high school.
However, these past several months, I’m the happiest I’ve been in my entire life. It’s easy to attribute that to changing circumstances, or the fact that hormones suck less after high school.
It’s more than just being happier and more proactive about my general situation. I’m much less anxious and irritable about small things. My overall perspective is also radically different. I’ve always been kind of melancholy and negative, but somehow I’ve become fundamentally optimistic and hopeful, not just about my own future, but about my entire worldview and humanity.
I’m not an expert. Heck, I have even less life experience than the average 20-year-old. Many people’s issues are much more serious and complex than mine, or involve external problems beyond their control.
What I do know is that a lot of other people also struggle with feeling lost or inadequate. One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that I could’ve saved myself a lot of distress by actually communicating with other people. So, who knows, I might actually help someone.
Happiness, like all accomplishments, takes work.
We’ve become more pragmatic to the point that we now commonly acknowledge that love, while indeed magical, takes work. Happiness is the same way.
Sometimes I feel like 90% of the reason I despise most self-help advice is a single word: “just.” “Just” think happy thoughts, “just” stop feeling sorry for yourself, “just” choose to be happy. You absolutely have to choose to be happy, no argument, but anything that suggests an easy, magical fix to all your problems is lazy and reductive. It lumps all issues together into one simplistic mess and doesn’t actually give you any helpful tips on how, exactly, you “just” change your entire worldview.
There’s a reason most New Year’s resolutions fail and inspirational memes don’t actually “make your heart happy” for longer than 10 seconds. I knew a guy who insisted there was no point in trying to change his life, because he’d already tried that and it didn’t work. But life isn’t a dispenser where you put in X coins and get Y happiness.
I’ve known people who are naturally pretty happy, and if you’re one of those, that’s wonderful. I also know a lot of people who, like me, have struggled with happiness and have just gotten angrier with themselves because they couldn’t figure out why. There’s a reason this article is titled “What You Have to Learn Before You Can Be Happy”, not “What You Have to Learn in Order to Be Happy.” Things won’t magically get better, but don’t be discouraged when things don’t magically fall in place overnight. We like to think of epiphanies as solutions, when in reality they’re more like prerequisites.