Not UNHAPPY Beats HAPPY Every Time. HUH?
– by Coach Colle Davis
This article promises to induce brain cramps and most should skip it.
Warning: Thought and personal conclusions require energy, time, belief suspension and some humor to accept. No flames or silly comments or questions until you have been not unhappy for a few days.
The ability to make another person happy for any length of time is impossible because you are not in control of their feelings. Your behavior can make them happy once in a while for a short time. Contrary to current society’s media driven belief, life is not about being happy all the time. Life is about being not unhappy. Thinking along these lines the world appears in a different light.
- Start here. What has to happen to make sure your spouse or someone close to you is not unhappy. The question is harder to answer than first imagined. The more the question is explored, the more you can see how being happy is transient and being not unhappy is possible full or almost full time.
- Do you wake up happy each day? Or are you not unhappy when you wake up? Here is a differentiator: Do you smile when you first wake up? Or are you grateful to be alive? Some of the answer is age related and most is a default mode.
Being in a state of not unhappy is a challenge in language. Happy receives so much press even the US Constitution makes a big deal of it. The pursuit of happiness, what hogwash. Pursuit is defines the problem and it leads to unhappiness. The striving to be happy all the time causes physical and psychological problems.
Consider the not unhappy aspects of life. When you are asleep you are not unhappy. Most of the day you are engaged in life and being productive or at least taking up space and consuming resources and not unhappy. On occasion you are happy. The feeling may last a few minutes, (think of receiving flowers) or several hours and never longer. Life steps in to temper the transient feeling.
Adding up all the happy time you have ever experienced yields a very tiny amount and yet pursuing it expended a huge portion of your resources and brain power. The consumer market is driven by the quest for happiness and buying the things that are supposed to create the elusive feeling.
The economics of being not unhappy are compelling. Food, shelter and clothing are available and plentiful for most. Start accepting this idea not unhappy costs nothing. Building a life on not unhappy is inexpensive. Living a great and enjoyable life results from being not unhappy.
- The happy feeling is expensive, fleeting and leads to unhappiness.
- Unhappiness is sadness, sorrow, grief, misery, discontent and gloom. Those are very different from being not unhappy.
- Unhappiness is when one is missing happy or happiness. Thinking that you are lacking happiness makes one unhappy.
- The state of being not unhappy is a reflection of your life being wonderful, productive, exciting and accepting.
- Focus on the ‘not’ part of the state. In being not unhappy your world is functioning with the least friction and you are making the best of your resources.
- Being happy actually slows you down as you savor the feeling and want to prolong it.
