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I want X, then I will be happy. I get X, time passes, then I want Y, then I think I will be happy. Whether or not I get Y, I am never happy, the cycle continues. This is the hedonistic treadmill and we never get off. “Your conditions for happiness are the chains of your suffering.” You see, happiness is one of those tricky things where in order to get it, we have to be it. We have a base line level of happiness that we return to. We return to this baseline, regardless of the bad and the good that happens to us, see below. 

In a prior post, I stated life is like the stock market, we have our ups and our downs, but we revert to the mean. So if we can make sure we are overall going in an upward trajectory, to accept the highs and lows as necessary and invest in the “index fund” of life. If we think our desires = happiness, we are mistaken, every single time. If it worked, you would have been happy a long time ago, when all you wanted as a kid was an ice cream cone. But guess what, times changed, so did you, and so did what would make you happy. 

What would make you happy now? A bigger house? A Ferrari? How many Ferraris could you get before THAT was boring? 1? 100? Desire is an itch that cannot be scratched. 

If i think a $100 million mega yacht will make me happy then I have 3 options: 1) I can never be happy if I don’t get it, 2) I get it, then something else will make me happy, or 3) my happiness had nothing to do with a $100 million mega yacht. Desire is a trickster, a magician, a liar that our brain gets tricked by every single time. More, more, more, never enough until like drinking alcohol, it’s more until too much. 

So how do we get off the treadmill? “Conscious appreciation.” There is no scarcity, except in your mind. You are enough. You have enough. Your level of happiness is what you are and will be, regardless of the good and the bad things that happen to you. practice gratitude for what you are and what you have, that person is what a past you would have dreamed of being. Conscious appreciation- being grateful, is the mental hijack to be in the NOW, not the regret of the past or the fear of the future.

This does not mean to stop achieving, merely to stop attaching your happiness to it. To find happiness, be happy. Today, tonight, tomorrow. Be in the now, consciously appreciative, smile in the arena. 

But, they say “money doesn’t buy happiness but I’d rather cry in a Ferrari” haha 

The unbelievably beautiful future or perhaps the catastrophe coming, the regret and pain of the past. How often do we spend wishing we would have acted differently? A mistake made, a witty counter to an argument we wish we would have said in the moment, wishing we would have. We could have, we would have, we should have. 

How often do we spend in agony thinking of the pain yet to come? The school speech, the work presentation, trial, Monday morning on a Sunday night. In a declassified interrogation manual, the CIA found that a person is more likely to talk with the fear of pain, rather than the inflecting of pain. Know why? Imagination. 

We are extremely creative, us humans, often to our own detriment. In our minds we can imagine the worst of torture chambers, true catastrophic demise that neither happened in the past or will happen in the future. How often do we do the thing we are afraid of and say “that wasn’t so bad!” How often do we think we want a cheeseburger, nicotine, more money, and the reality wasn’t as good/bad as we imagined? 

Stay in the now, the past wasn’t as good/bad as we think it was, the future won’t be as great/awful as we think it will be. Nothing is forever, you will be ok. Until tomorrow, smile in the arena of life today.

If you want to feel better, be kind to someone else. This Smile in the Arena stuff is not bullshit. Spreading kindness, through at least a smile to others, drops a pebble and the ripples spread and spread. The ripples change the world.

I received this letter from my mother. “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” Aesop. The letter calls me “dear one” and goes on to show how spreading kindness is so significant to others, no matter how small we “think” it is. My mother, as usual, backs her stance with not just her opinion but through the Journal of Experimental Psychology and a professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

Great work mom, I agree with all of my heart what we try to do. But, enough writing about it, let’s go live it! See you out there in the arena mom, I know I will meet you there, with both of us smiling.

As humans, we suffer. All too often we are in the pain, guilt, regret of the past or the worry, fear, imagined catastrophe of the future. In the middle is the now, wheee we have control, where the past is gone and the future isn’t here yet. But how?

To be in the now, radically accept reality as it is. “The Power of Now” is a masterful book on the Now -which should be studied by all. Breathing and focusing on what our breath, brings us to the now. What also brings us to the now is to imagine that you are recording1 all that you see. Imagine everything you see is you recording. What you think, see., feel, this is the live footage being recorded that will be used and relied on later.

The time is now, be in now, now? Action!!!

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Why do bad things happen? Why can’t we control things enough to stop the bad things? The pain, regret, guilt, self-condemnation of past mistakes, why didn’t we do better? Why did the bad things happen? I heard a line once, which was “everyone is doing the best they can, with the information they had at the time.” True. But the inexplainable bad things that happen to us, not what we decide, what about them? Well the fact is, it’s out of our control. We don’t control the bad things that happen to us, we can only control how we respond.

Misery is unavoidable, bad things will happen, it is not in our control. Thank God bad things do happen or we wouldn’t be able to feel what good things feel like. What is sunshine without the rain? Miserable things happening to us are not in our control, but staying miserable is. A man lost his child and refused to stay miserable. “I refuse to have her death, the reason be something bad, it must be for something good.” Misery sucks. If it’s not good, then it’s good cause to cause good.

Good cause is a legal term denoting adequate or substantial grounds or reason to take a certain action, or to fail to take an action prescribed by law. So, misery is good cause to cause good in the world. Help another, be kind, smile, laugh, do some good. The worse things get, the more “good cause” you have to cause good. The world is cold, go be warm to someone.

So often we are trapped in either the regret/ guilt/suffering of the past or the fear/worry/suffering of the future. How we expected things to be in the past and how we failed or how we expect things to be in the future and what we fear expecting to happen. Bouncing between the past and future like bouncing between hot sides in an oven. Suffering; expectations resisting reality.

Buddhists say that failing to get what we desire, our attachment to things, is suffering. Stoic/Marcus Aurelius said “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it” meaning suffering doesn’t happen to us, our own judgment and self create suffering. We should not hope for things to go as we desire, the past or the future expectations, but for the past and future to go exactly as they did and exactly how they will.

This is not to say we shouldn’t dream and strive for the best, on the contrary, this is to do our best in the things we can control and not suffer in the things we can’t

Show up unprepared, show up unready, show up scared. What I have found about those I respect most, is that there is honor in showing up. Showing up to trial, showing up to a work presentation, getting out of bed and showing up for the day when things are tough. Showing up to our personal arena.

Don’t wait for the day you aren’t afraid, it’s not coming. Today, show up to the arena. Ready or not, scared, vulnerable, however you feel, show up and face what we are afraid of. As the Stoics say, “the obstacle is the way.”

I love this! I saw that I had a comment, I was so excited, the comment was the above. It hurt me. It hurts to share what’s on your heart and face rejection, meanness, the world’s rejection of your courage to be vulnerable. But I cannot fail to practice what I preach. If we let the world dictate our emotions, we are slaves to the public.

Man in the Arena is what I live my life by. Theodore hit it out of the park. His speech saved me in a dark time and I say the speech daily. We are not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or how the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.

if you are getting criticism, you aren’t moving forward. As Marcus Aurelius says, the obstacle is the way. Go in the direction of criticism, seek it, we know we are going the right way in video games when there is new obstacles, new enemies to fight, new challenges.

I love this critic and will love the next. The difficulty is when the worst critic, the merciless one, is ourselves. For anyone reading, take what helps and leave the rest. Smile, laugh, brush the critic off, and get back in the arena! Thank you “Isreal Nite club!” May the cowards of the internet abyss armed with keyboard, who spew worthless toxicity which is only their own inadequacies projected, never be unable to find me!

“All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.” (Joseph Campbell [1904 – 1987]. If you haven’t heard the above, maybe you have heard “attitude determines your altitude.”Jesus said “the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21)” But we often say in response, “ya but you don’t understand MY problems, MINE are actually difficult.” Well, take it from a man who was ripped into a concentration camp during the holocaust.

in Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, a doctor in neurology, a man in the absolute torture and hell of suffering in the Nazi concentration camps, embraces attitude. Viktor stated that everything can be taken from a person but for one thing, the last of our human freedoms, the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances and to choose one’s own way.

Buddhists say that suffering is lack of acceptance of pain. We fight it. We are in the pain of regret of the past or the pain of worry of the future. Be in the now. Practice gratitude of the now. Accept the pain, it is only temporary and will pass.

choose happiness. Breathe, be grateful, laugh. Smile, in the arena of life

The good and the bad, even this, this too shall pass.

I just got out of my morning convenience store and the owner said he had to tell his mother to stop watching videos of snakes or she would think one was in the room. He said he watched a snake movie once and was in his bedroom with a flashlight convinced he saw a snake.

I said yes brother, we are what we consume. The workers all agreed with me. I said that’s the problem with politics, people plug into hate 24/7 and start to see problems everywhere. We need to eat mental vegetables. Smile, be kind to people, consume healthy things to see and feel healthy things.