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"I often tease my cat Harley for her lack of ambition. As far as I can tell, she’s content to eat, sleep, and collect belly scratches. 'Damnit, Harley. You’re sixteen and what have you achieved?' ” |
"Most people [have a] superficial conception of happiness. But happiness is deep. It is a reverential attitude toward your life. It is a hard-won, enduring form of joy that can only be achieved through the realisation of your values, including very abstract values like reason, purpose, and self-esteem.
"Given how superficial the conventional understanding of happiness is, it’s no surprise that the conventional understanding of how to achieve happiness is equally superficial. Tony Robbins’ website lists 17 ways to feel happier, and while much of the advice isn’t awful, claiming that happiness is primarily a matter of spending more time outdoors, listening to upbeat music, and journaling is like saying that a successful marriage is made by buying your partner flowers.
"What Robbins and almost everyone else ignores is the role of morality in achieving happiness. And to the extent they don’t ignore it, they promote the anti-happiness morality of altruism. 'Remember,' Robbins tells us, 'the secret to living is giving.' I get it. It rhymes. But just because the words fit, don’t make ‘em legit.
"Even many Effective Egoists, however, don’t appreciate the full implications of a pro-self morality for happiness. There is what I call a hidden art of happiness, which is easy to miss yet indispensable to understand and practice if you want to live a life that you love. ...
"Your life is a sacred value, but you have to work to make it sacred by living up to a pro-life morality—and you have to work to experience it as sacred by practicing the hidden art of happiness: the art of making your abstract values concrete and real—and of bringing out out the abstract meaning of the concrete.
"I have explained again and again how the biggest barrier to people adopting the morality of Effective Egoism is their embarrassingly primitive notion of self-interest—a notion nurtured so successfully by altruism’s propagandists. They equate self-interest with empty narcissism and equate the pursuit of happiness with accumulating meaningless pleasures.
"Few people have the first clue what self-interest means. And who would tell them, when even the motivational speakers and licensed psychologists who make careers out telling you how to be happy are unable to conceive of the heart and soul of seeking joy?
"The core of self-interest, its actual heart and soul, is conceiving of a vision of who you want to be and the world you want live in, and bringing that into reality. ...
"That is the hidden art of happiness. It is the art of devoting your days and your thoughts to your highest values and aspirations—to your vision of the life you want to create, and do create with each day that you author."~ Don Watkins, from his post 'The Hidden Art of Happiness'
