The depths

It's amazing how easy it is to be horrible, even when your intentions are so good (from your own perspective). So easy to slip back into the patterns we're used to, so easy to forget why you're here

Committed

I feel renewed, entirely committed to my goal. I want to raise the happiness of all people (let's say, 10%). I don't know how we're going to do it, but we'll get there. Today I am certain.

"... I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land..."

Wasted time?

I often reflect on my 4 years spent at UCSB, and typically shake my head in disgust for "wasting" so much time during such an important developmental period of my life. I could have been learning from the smartest, developing my intelligence, competing with future world leaders, and building valuable connections. Instead, I squandered it by enjoying the beach mindset, trying to "excel" at parties, and generally spending more time on myself than necessary. Sometimes I try to shift the blame to others (or simply justify the decisions I made) by telling myself that they made me think that such things were important. It's hard not to resent myself and others sometimes.

But today while I was writing a reflection paper, I realized that I should be very thankful for that influence, for the influence that led me to question what the most important aspect of life was. Is it success? Accomplishment? All of these things are meaningless in the long run (given that in the long run, we're dead). It was this type of questioning that was the seed of my happiness fixation, for which I am extremely thankful. I truly believe that after much searching, I've found the true meaning of life, and have discovered the best way to live it (regardless of whether I actually execute it...)

So maybe it wasn't wasted time at all. Maybe I need to be more thankful for my friends who taught me selfish enjoyment. Their intuition was that there was something deeper there, and indeed there is.

The present is all we have

I had a "eureka" moment in the shower the other day concerning the nature of time and happiness. More of just a thought blurb:

Many people think that the recommendation to "be happy in the present" is based on the fear that we could die at any moment, or that we might not wake up to appreciate the day tomorrow, and is therefore a rather negative or shortsighted way of looking at things. In business speak, you could say that this strategy is risk averse -- life in the future is not guaranteed, so we should value happiness today over (non-guaranteed) happiness in the future.

However, saying that we have to be happy and love today is not being risk averse or dark; it requires the realization that the present is the only moment we are capable of happiness.

Again, just to repeat, it requires us to understand the fundamental truth that the present moment is the only one in which we can experience happiness (or anything else for that matter).

We can think of countless times when we thought we'd be happy in the future ("ooh, I'm going to have a delicious dinner with friends tomorrow"), and then later on, we actually were ("ah, it's so great to have dinner with friends"). Because we were excited about it when we thought about the event, we mistake that excitement for actually experiencing future happiness. In reality, we were thinking about the event, which made us happy in the present moment -- we did not, however, experience future happiness. This entire paragraph is really just getting at the fact that we can't experience anything but what we experience in the present moment.

But what are the implications for our happiness?

Basically, we should stop worrying about the future and trying to be happy then, because it's simply not possible. By the very nature of our existence, we can only experience happiness in the present moment. So why not make that happiness happen now? And then now? And how about now? What about... always?

It's a matter of first pausing our endless thoughts about what we "should have done" or "what we're going to do to be happy in the future," and then simply being thankful for the wonder around us.

It's about realizing that we're here, in the present, and that's how it always will be. Once we understand that, it's a matter of saying: "I want to be happy now, because it's great to be alive!"

There's no better time than the present...