HAPPINESS AND UNHAPPINESS It’s not something with empirical support, just an obs

HAPPINESS AND UNHAPPINESS

It’s not something with empirical support, just an observation that’s proven consistent over a lifetime: most unhappiness is the result of wishing someone else would act in a way that you wish they would, our by you acting differently from how someone else wishes you would.

Very few of us manage to realize the obvious fact that the world is absolutely overflowing with human beings. And you’re better off looking around for those people who you don’t want to act differently, and who don’t want you to act differently than you ever will be trying to change others or, sometimes, changing yourself.

It’s a demonstration of intelligence to make the choice to seek out others. It’s a demonstration of wisdom to know whether or not to change yourself. But only a fool tries to change others to suit one’s preferences. And thats mostly why the world is full of unhappy fools.

Unfortunately, family and familiar relations are cheap entertainment and security, many and people prefer to buy consistently unpleasant familial and familiar entertainment at low cost rather than invest in new relations us care far less about changing our familial relations, and far more about tolerating them. This isn’t so much just foolishness, but laziness or the poverty of the malcontented mind.

But the ability to joyfully tolerate unhappy family members who you wish would act differently, or who wish you would act differently, is a product of the number and quality of relationships who wish neither. So emotional wealth which we call happiness is the result of finding and cultivating those relationships.