“Do more of what makes you happy.” These are the words of the sole magnet on a refrigerator nearby me as I write this. Seems simple enough, right? But the pursuit of what makes one happy can be confusing, long, and arduous. Some people pursue money, others pursue status, and all the while they aren’t even sure if this is what makes them happy. Inspirational speakers and eastern philosophers alike exhort us to reflect on what true happiness is, and to not pursue what is pushed upon us. There are so many unhappy wealthy people with status out there, so the “accumulate what [you think] makes you happy” path can be a dangerous one.
The key here is what you think makes you happy. It can take many years, trying out many different paths and lifestyles, before one settles surely on a path to happiness. With so many influences bearing down on us — our family, our friends, media, workplace, school — is it any surprise so many people don’t know what makes them happy?
A better approach to this, and one that my friend Isaac Morehouse has noted before, is to find the things that make you unhappy and eliminate those from your life. As you incorporate this philosophy in to your daily decision-making, you’ll slowly discover the things that truly make you happy by eliminating all the things that make you unhappy.
This is something I promised myself I’d internalize not much more than a year ago. “I don’t do things I don’t like doing,” is how I explain it to friends. Sure, there are some things you have to do, but if you are doing those things and are honest with yourself, it is because you hope that will enable you to do less of what you don’t like doing in the future. If you are unsure of why you are doing them, then chances are you are simply going about the motions.
“I don’t do things I don’t like doing” sometimes garners chuckles from friends and family for how obvious a thing it seems. “Of course you don’t! Why would you? Why would anybody do things they don’t like doing?”
But many people do. They lead entire lives doing things they don’t like doing. They work a job they don’t like. They major in a subject they don’t enjoy. They trudge through a relationship that has long lost any fire — if it ever had any. They go through the motions that they caught themselves in for a variety of reasons — maybe they thought it was something they’d only have to do for a short period of time, or maybe it was something that was once enjoyable but breaking out of the motions would take too much effort — for whatever reason, it is something that simply makes them unhappy.
Why? Because deciding to stop doing those things takes too much work? Compared to what? It takes work to be unhappy. It takes work to do things you don’t like doing. You have to make a conscious effort every time this happens. You can make a conscious effort not to.
This doesn’t mean quit your job, leave your family, and go start a new life, but it can mean to go out and start the job hunt. It can mean putting in work to light your relationship anew, or to take the time to try out a new hobby instead of going to that happy hour you’ve been sucked in to for the past few weeks. Maybe it means looking at a new city to move to if you don’t like where you live, and maybe this means looking to see if you work remotely.
Identifying the things you don’t like doing and no longer doing them is the best way you can make a big impact on your happiness. For me, it was deciding to do more work that I found fulfilling and less I found frustrating, spending less time and money on things that many of my peers enjoyed, but I found frustrating or unfulfilling, and being conscious of this fact.
It takes work — but it takes less work than the alternative.