Happiness is not a prize you get sometime in the future, after you achieve a goal, or pass a test, or become worthy. If you believe that it is a prize you have to wait for, I guarantee that you are struggling to achieve your goals. You are sabotaging your own...
A Fuller Concept of Happiness
If you want to be happy, you need to know what happiness is. Yet, it is widely misunderstood. Like many abstract concepts that involve values, the concept of “happiness” has been distorted, obfuscated, and denied by philosophers, making it harder for us to understand...
What You Need to Know about Suffering to Be Happy
In the first article in this series, I explained the fundamental nature of happiness, which I learned from Ayn Rand. Elaborating on this concept, she wrote: In psychological terms, the issue of man's survival does not confront his consciousness as an issue of...
Accepting Reality as the Key to Minimizing Suffering
In the previous article in this series on happiness, I argued that it is important to your happiness that you fight suffering, that you develop skill at minimizing it. I then gave some practical advice on how to mitigate suffering: say "no" to overload, don't be...
Serenity as a Stepping Stone to Happiness
In my last article, I argued that accepting reality helps you move from a state of suffering to a state of serenity. Indeed, when you are suffering, achieving serenity is a practical short-term goal. It provides an important stepping stone to a deep, lasting...
Your Indirect Control over Your Own Happiness
Our general topic has been happiness. We now get to the essential issue: can you make yourself happy? The answer is yes — but not by a direct process. You cannot guarantee existential success, nor can you predict your future emotions or your exact future...
Productive Work, Happiness, and the Value Orientation
In this series on happiness, I have distinguished short-term pleasures and temporary joys from true happiness. To be in a state of true happiness, you need to gain your values every day, week, month, and year. This requires not only that you accept facts of reality,...
How to Think About Emotions
In the most recent article in this series on happiness, I mentioned that the next topic would be embracing causality. To be happy, you need to understand the causal factors that contribute to your present emotional state so that you can enact the causes that will...
The Role of Self-Understanding in Happiness
Self-understanding is critical to achieving enduring happiness. This assertion may seem simple and obvious. Happiness requires that you consistently achieve your values. To have such consistent success, you need to factor your own capabilities into your plans. But to...
How Do You Measure Happiness?
Peter Drucker once said, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." That applies to happiness just as much as to the quality of automobiles that Toyota is producing. If you want to be happier, a good place to start is to make objective just how happy you are...
Happiness and Embracing Causality
In a previous article, I argued that accepting reality gets you serenity. In this article, I will make a case that embracing causality gets you happiness. More exactly, my point is that consciously embracing the role of the causal agent of your own happiness is...
The Primacy of Existence and Happiness
This series of articles on happiness is based on a specific view of the relationship of the mind and the world, which Ayn Rand called "the primacy of existence." This is the idea that "the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that...
The Role of Philosophy in Happiness
This series of articles on happiness would not be possible without the philosophic foundation I got from studying Ayn Rand, with much help from other Objectivist philosophers. Ayn Rand gave me an integrated understanding of the world, how you know it, and what matters...
Confidence versus Optimism
Confidence is a crucial aspect of happiness. In this article, I will resume my series on the "Concept of Happiness” with a focus on confidence. As a reminder of the context, happiness comes from the achievement of your values. Not a value. Your values. You need to...
Confidence, Certainty, and Understanding Your Own Motivation
In the previous article in this series, I said that confidence is the emotion that proceeds from the conclusion that you have sufficient skill that your current or proposed effort will result in success. But if the task is at all difficult, how can you reach such a...
The Work of Happiness
I derive my ideas on happiness from Ayn Rand, who wrote, among other things, "Morality...is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life." (AR, The...
Raising Baseline Happiness
In preparation for a new series of classes on "The Work of Happiness" in the Thinking Lab, I have been doing some high-level thinking about how you raise your baseline happiness. As I wrote in How Do You Measure Happiness?, your "baseline happiness" is the overall...