 Today I'm going to talk about why happiness is the wrong goal for us to have so stay with me So I think we all probably want to be happy in life, and I'm not here today to talk about why There's something wrong with being happy. I think you know if you could say To me that David, I'm really happy in my life. I wouldn't say to you that you have the wrong goal My issue with having go happiness as a goal in life is that it typically doesn't work and Being happy is fantastic There's no doubt about it And I'm not even saying here that happiness is the wrong old have or that happiness doesn't exist happiness absolutely exists I think we probably all know that on one level because we've had moments in life when we've been happy But if we go through life with I want to be happy. I want to be happy That's going to lead the problems and I'll explain why here I'm actually going to talk about five reasons why that's going to be a kind of a frustrating approach to take And I'm going to talk about an alternative goal to set it's dead so the first reason I think happiness is To be happy is the wrong goal for us is because the concept happy to be happy Happiness is very abstract. It's too abstract so If we have it as a goal and we're aiming for something and we don't really know exactly precisely what it is We're trying to get with that. It's too abstract. It's not well defined. You're never going to get there There are so many definitions of what it means to be happiness or what happiness is you ask a hundred people You'll get a hundred different answers one Really interesting thing I saw recently. There was a documentary about these hunter-gatherers in Tanzania in Africa And they're the last or one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on earth. There's like 1500 of them or something There's very few of these people left, but they the documentarian asked one of the hunters in that tribe What is happiness and his answer was? Happiness is when I find meat for my people Okay, now that answer to us probably doesn't resonate very much But the point being here is that His answer was a fine answer But everybody's answer is going to be different so I Guess if we're going to search for happiness It's difficult because we don't really know exactly what it is or at least we can't turn to other people to find a good work and Definition that's going to work for us personally So the first problem with happiness as a goal is that it's too abstract and it's ill-defined Now the second Thing even if we said well, I'll create happiness on my own terms Okay, we have another problem with that Okay, I'm not going to use anybody else's definition. I'm going to use my own definition of what it means But here's a problem we have with that if you if you're going to search for this thing and try and find it How many real moments of happiness have we had in life? In order to know what it is that you're going to find or what you're looking for we kind of have to know it well Can't be abstract and even if we're going off our own experiences with happiness. How many Hours of our life have we spent in a state of real happiness the Malcolm Gladwell's book outliers he talks about I think it's a 10,000 hour rule he talks about in that book to become proficient or an expert in anything Takes about 10 10,000 hours of Direct experience with that thing. I don't know about you But I I'm not sure if I've had 10,000 hours of pure happiness to know exactly what it is To set it as a goal for my life to go out there and chase it So this the second point is even if we're going off our own definition Do we really have enough direct experience with happiness to know exactly what it is? So that's another kind of point against setting happiness as the goal in life Now the third point I would say on this and this is maybe the most important one of all I'm going out there into my life and happiness is my goal What I'm trying to make it happen. I'm trying to cause bring about happiness in my life There's an assumption there that happiness can be caused and I think it's a big assumption. What if happiness can't be caused? so the way I like to take a happiness is Happiness is like a spontaneous symptom of something else in Other words we can't directly Create happiness. I'm not saying we're helpless. There's not anything we can do. I'm going to talk about that soon but a way to think about this it's a spontaneous symptom can't be controlled brought about true control can't be directly manipulated into existence happiness a Way we know this is true is imagine if I asked you this Imagine I said okay wake up tomorrow, and I want you to do one thing and that thing is to make a day full of happiness for yourself Would you feel confident about doing that? I Think most of us would feel not that confident. I mean if happiness is our goal in life. Why aren't we happy? Right now today if it was that easy to bring about directly an Alternative question is what if I asked you tomorrow to wake up and instead of making a day full of happiness for yourself to make a day full of misery and negative emotion Now we wouldn't want to do that but I think we would agree that that will be easier to Manipulate and bring it to existence than a day of real happiness for ourselves so My point is we're all after trying to create happiness directly do this do that in order to bring about happiness This is the thing that's going to make me happy. It's the next job. It's the more money It's that thing I want to buy online whatever next relationship and Invariably we find you know, this isn't really working that well So our attempts to directly manipulate or create happiness don't work and maybe it doesn't have a direct cause Okay, now that sounds pretty bleak, but I'm going to talk now about an alternative. You see we can we do feel comfortable Bringing about that negative experience. Okay. I mean if you really put your mind to it And you wanted to create a day for yourself full of negative emotion I mean you'd probably if you really had to do that you'd have it done within an hour You know, it's so easy for us to do that. So The reason happiness is a bad goal is that it's relying on something We don't really have that much experience with maybe it can't be caused, but here's what we should think about We do have knowledge. This is the fourth point here We'd already have existing knowledge that is much more useful than this thing about well my my existing knowledge about happiness What is it that we have we should be using our existing knowledge which we're not experts in happiness Don't have that much direct experience with it, but we should be using our direct experience of Emotional suffering or conflict That is something And this is maybe a little bit hard to hear, but I think a lot of us probably have Upwards going on over 10,000 hours of emotional pain or conflict inside us We know what that feels like But here's the thing that is not a bad thing necessarily that is something that is very very useful information Instead of seeing these negative emotions that we experience is a bad thing. What if they are actually sort of pointers to something for us We have direct knowledge of those things and if we can start to listen into what that conflict inside us is saying or that emotional pain is saying That is where our attention and focus needs to be The final point here, which is related to this is that instead of happen having happiness as our goal in life Our goal we have a better goal Which is to listen into this emotional suffering and this inner conflict and our goal now becomes I'm simply going to work on ending this emotional conflict that I experience and If we get good at that And we get good at listening to this emotional conflict and get good at meeting these emotional needs for ourselves There is this spontaneous symptom that just happens to pop up over here Which is called happiness Now we don't Manipulate it directly, but if we're listening into this emotional suffering inside us or this conflict and get to work meeting our emotional needs We understand this we can feel this directly already these this these emotional signals in our body then it's like Happiness just has a habit of showing up all by itself a way to think about this is like a little child Okay, a little baby or something and that baby screams when its emotional needs are not been met now when a baby or a small child is Crys out and their emotional pain is heard. It's validated and then it's met. They're taken care of The child just goes about its life very happily and it doesn't sit around wondering what is the purpose of life or How can I make myself happy? The child just is happy We tend to think of ourselves as a little bit more evolved than that, but essentially if we can really like a lot of times I ask people like what are your emotional needs and They're like why no idea what they are now they may already be meeting some of their emotional needs Just not been aware of what they are But it's very important for us to become aware of what it is that I need emotionally to feel Not necessarily happy but to feel balanced inside myself where there's no inner conflict It's this inner conflict that really takes us away from an experience of happiness. So our job becomes okay Well, what's causing the conflict? I'm not going to try and manipulate a happy situation What's already taking place right here under my own nose? And if I can become really really curious about that and and the thing is people become very hopeless Because first of all, maybe they don't know what their emotional needs are and then they think to themselves Well, even if I do know what they are, I don't think I can meet them It is very very possible to meet your emotional needs our emotional needs are Yes often in a state of conflict, maybe some of these emotional needs become a dominant need and maybe we repress and ignore other ones But once we find a way to validate all of the needs that we have inside us and start to see them as these inner children that we have and And start to self parent them in other words finding balance validating them all not picking favour. It's not ignoring some over others Not necessarily sharing giving them all exactly the same amount of time and energy necessarily but validating them all and giving them all something In a way that's not going to overwhelm you now There's a kind of a happy experience there that happens which just I think is called happiness over here But it's not directly caused again. Can't wake up and go and make yourself happy directly by doing something We have to listen in to our emotional body. That's really the missing piece with this. It's Okay, I don't know I'm not going to read about this in a book about happiness And I'm not going to listen to somebody else tell me how to be happy I'm going to listen to my my body essentially my emotional body is a very very important indicator of how I can actually meet an end Meet my emotional needs and conflict then just happen to experience this thing called happiness So to recap here, it's too abstract happiness is too abstract a concept. We don't really know what it is It can't be caused directly even if it is a goal we already have existing knowledge that we should be using which is our emotional body and We have a much better goal anyway, which is just to simply end in our conflict So My the book I wrote recently. It's a shorty book you can get it for free in my website It's it offers like a model for okay. Well, if you don't know what your emotional needs are start with this model There's five emotional needs. I talk about which is Responsibility or security meaning purpose creativity Taking care of yourself physically some exercise. Maybe there's reflection and spontaneity slash relaxation This need tends to be the black sheep in the family This need tends to be the golden child that gets all the attention certainly psychological attention But if we can find some kind of degree of balance with that I am of the opinion that we tend to experience happiness on a much more regular basis So if you want to check that out, it's on my website. I'll put the link for it below but Those are my thoughts and happiness guys. I hope that's useful information Again, I'm not saying that happiness doesn't exist happiness. Absolutely exists Is it a good thing to be happy 100%? I think it's very important to be happy in life It's just a question of having it as my goal Maybe leading us in the wrong direction away from the emotional indicators that are indirectly going to get us there So hope that's useful information guys and as always thanks for joining me here. I'll see you again next time. Take care