Happiness must be created

When after my hiking trip at Yosemite Park last year I finally got to have a hot tea, take a hot shower and sleep in a warm bed, it was an amazing feeling. Four days of strenuous exercise, feeling really cold at night and lacking all the comforts of everyday life made me appreciate a bed and a hot drink so much. I don’t think I will forget this amazing feeling so soon. And I must say that in this moment I really felt happiness.

  
My hiking trip in Yosemite National Park – cold and tiring

One thing that I learned early on was that happiness does not come from pursuing “pleasures” like watching TV. I only had a television once, when I was a student and my grandma insisted that I should take her spare one, because how could one live without a television in those times? Well, I only had it for a couple of weeks. It did not make me feel happy. The amount of time I wasted and how much I hated myself for doing it in fact made me really unhappy.

Needless to say, avoiding what prevents us from being happy is easier said than done, because these things often involve habits and addicted behavior and hence seem to be beyond our control. Take playing mobile or computer games. Luckily, I can honestly say that I never played a mobile or computer game in my life, with the exception of this very exciting tele-tennis game when I was in my early teens.
 
  
I don’t remember feeling particular happy when I got to play this game, though. If I think back to my early teenage years, one moment I do remember as very happy was when I finished my last final (oral) exam at the end of 10th grade. I did very well in the exam after being really anxious and nervous. And I remember kneeling down and feeling so happy about completing the exam and having the whole summer filled up with exciting things. I was excited about our tennis team’s final and all-important match of the season, the bicycle tour that our class had planned during the summer break and the trip with my parents and my sister to Bulgaria. Hence, happiness can come from accomplishment as well as anticipation.
 

In the end, we lost the tennis match that I was so looking forward to. And the bicycle tour and camping holiday was not that much fun because it rained the whole time. But our family trip to Bulgaria was amazing! Ultimately, though, it is the anticipation of exciting experiences that matters.

I think it is quite easy for most people to create things that we can look forward to. Based on my experience, though, I can only really look forward to something after having accomplished something. Going home after a productive and tiring day is something to look forward to. Going home after wasting time all day is not. Going for a race after training hard is exciting. Going for a race without preparing for it is not fun. So based on my experience, accomplishing big or small things is really important to feel happy.

If accomplishments can make us happy, then we we should be able to create happy moments by taking on small challenges every day to overcome our fear, complacency or perceived physical or mental limits.
 
Achievements that we can accomplish daily are for example to take a cold shower instead of a hot one, doing a challenging exercise work-out, waking up early to have a productive morning, study for an hour to learn a language, or sign up for some improvement course. For instance, I try to do core exercises three times a week, and I must say I really resent doing them every time. But I know that they are really good for me, and most importantly, I know how good I feel if after I did them. Bringing myself to follow through on plans is the only way I can feel happy. It often takes special techniques, such as listening to music while doing the exercises and limiting the session to a minimum number of exercises that I need to do. It is not easy, but an easy life is not a happy life.
 

Apart from achievements, there is an equally effective thing we can do to be happy: refraining from things that do NOT produce happiness.

Last year I finally managed to stop eating chocolate and taking sugar with any drinks. Some people might consider eating chocolate and having sweet drinks as something that makes them feel happy. But can we honestly say that we led a happy life because we got to eat chocolate every day? NOT eating chocolate, on the other hand, does create happiness for me, not only due to the physical effects, but also because I feel really good and proud that I managed to overcome this addictive habit!

Refraining from things that we have gotten used to can also have other benefits. It can for instance act like a reset button. For most people, the older they get, the more convenient their lives become. This is because the default mode for humans is to always go towards a more convenient life. Imagine we one day take the car (if we have one) because it is raining. And it is so convenient, that we also take it the next day, even though it is not raining. And we find justifications for it, too, like we can save time to do important things. And before we know it, we have become dependent on the car and get upset if for any reason we cannot use it. 

Hence, if we do not sometimes reset our daily habits, we would essentially add more and more convenient habits to our life, eventually ending up being so dependent on all the comforts and luxuries that the smallest misshap makes us upset. It is easier to feel happy if we need less.

Stopping convenient habits also makes us stronger and feel more independent. If we know that we can get by without things that most people normally need, it can relieve a lot of stress and let us focus on what is important. I remember reading Gandhi’s autobiography as a student, in which Gandhi writes about how he lived while studying in London. Due to not having money, he walked everywhere, cooked his own meals, cut his own hair. At the time I read the book I was spending the summer in Tokyo. And so I started to walk everywhere, too, every day, literally for hours. It saved me a lot of money, but it also had a liberating effect. I felt that as a result of it, I was more in control of my life and gained independence.
 
Based on my experience, giving up things is an excellent way to reduce stress. For instance, I stopped going to the barber years ago and now do cut my own hair (very short, obviously). And I can say that when I watch guys in front of the mirror rectifying and styling their hair, I feel liberated because for the past 20 years I never had to worry about this. For me, the best way to secure a happy future as I get older is not to accumulate a lot of money. Instead, it would be to find ways to depend on less things including needing less money. And hence, this is what I am trying to work on (but I do find that this is not an easy task!).
 
It is interesting to note, though, that the reason I gave up going to the barber was not a conscious decision, but merely the result of my barber shop closing down. And then shortly after this, I happened to stand in the queue in an electronics store and noticed the hair clippers.
 
What this shows is that many of our habits are so strong that it is generally very hard to give them up. Taking cold showers because the water heater is broken is easy, but deciding to do it intentionally is hard. Stopping to buy things is easy if you have no money, but hard if it is one’s hobby (or addiction) and one has a regular inflow of money. But when we do manage to give up things, it often makes us realize that we don’t actually need many things.

In fact, I am always amazed how prone we are to false beliefs. We think we need a lot of things, but when we don’t have them, we actually quickly get used to it most of the time. We realise that we can accommodate and get by without them just fine, and are often in fact happier without them. I guess the reason why we hold on to what we are used to is that we cannot imagine what it would be like giving up something. Hence, we usually only give up things if we are forced to do it.

I must admit that I personally still have a lot of habits that do distract my peace of mind and productivity. I find that if I want to give up things, the internet is really a great source for advice. One can find advice to any given habit, not all works for everyone, but some do, and the results are often transforming and liberating. But still, changing habits is really difficult to achieve. It is often only possible by finding way to avoid sliding back into the habit. Often times the only way that works for me is go “cold turkey” and stop something completely, so that no excuses are possible.

In conclusion, happiness can be created, and for me it is by taking up small challenges on a daily basis and skipping convenient habits. This is not easy and requires continuous effort. However, we should also remember that nobody is 100% of the time the ideal person. And it is perfectly normal and ok to sometimes make exceptions and enjoy and appreciate things that we long for. But to keep these things special, they should be the exception rather than the rule.