Yearning for shit we don’t have.

I’ll admit it. I’ve been jumping back and forth in Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic despite the book’s idea to only read one stoic principle a day… quite badass, I know.

Anyway, I wanted to share today’s daily stoic with you. (The book consists of 366 meditations and is built up like a calendar with one meditation every day.)

Enter Ryan Holiday and Epictetus:

“It is quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for what we don’t have. Happiness has all that it wants, and resembling the well-fed, there shouldn’t be hunger or thirst.” — Epictetus, Discourses, 3.24.17

“I’ll be happy when I graduate, we tell ourselves. I’ll be happy when I get this promotion, when this diet pays off, when I have the money that my parents never had. Conditional happiness is what psychologists call this kind of thinking. Like the horizon, you can walk for miles and miles and never reach it. You won’t even get any closer. Eagerly anticipating some future event, passionately imagining something you desire, looking forward to some happy scenario — as pleasurable as these activities might seem, they ruin your chance at happiness here and now. Locate that yearning for more, better, someday and see it for what it is: the enemy of your contentment. Choose it or your happiness. As Epictetus says, the two are not compatible.”

Been there… looking forward to some future event and gluing it to my happiness. Just to make sure, that right now, I can’t be perfectly happy.

It’s what so many people seem to do: Living 5 days a week longing for the weekend… followed by 2 days of hating the weekdays to come.

Because we’re looking for the future event, we can’t really be happy now. And when the wished for future event finally comes, it isn’t half as good as we’ve foreseen.

It doesn’t even make us happy. Or it’s just a little boost. And we’re already looking for another great future event.

Happiness research tells us that extremely positive or negative events don’t really change our happiness level. Yeah, in good times and bad times our happiness stays more or less the same. But that’s not what we’d expect.

We expect astronomical changes in our happiness. And they won’t happen. Whether we break a leg or win the lottery, the difference in happiness is quite small. And after a while, the difference will be zero.

I remember studying for university exams. For two weeks or so I was looking forward to when the exams will be over. I thought I’ll be happy then. And when they were finally over –there was nothing… emptiness… unhappiness rather than a spike in happiness.

Now, this example actually shows two things. 1. Looking forward to some pleasurable event does not make you happy right now, because you think that now is the hard part, and the fun part will follow. So you think that you will only be happy once you have arrived at the anticipated fun part.

2. The future event will not be that happy either. Turned out that the anticipated fun part after the exams was not so much fun… I wasn’t even any happier than during the hard part. Actually, I felt worse. (Btw I just learned that while writing this.)

This shows that maybe we need something to strive for. If we just live into the day and have no clear tasks, we feel empty. Or at least that’s what happened to me after two weeks of full effort and with a clear goal.

Looking forward to the future might still serve some purpose.

Probably we need to be happy right now AND have a clear goal for the future.

I’m obviously not the first to come up with that. It’s what Vishen Lakhiani wrote about in his book The Code of the Extraordinary Mind (the link goes to my brother’s summary of the book). According to Vishen there’s an optimal state of being in which you’re experiencing feelings of growth and enjoyment, you’re feeling as if the universe has your back, and you almost seem to magically attract the right opportunities, ideas, and people towards you.

This optimal state of being requires two things:

Being happy right now Having a compelling vision for the future

And the first is meant to be first. You have to be happy first. Then, and only then, can you go further and create that compelling goal for your future.

Watch out: A goal ≠ a goal.

There are different types of goals you can set. (Since this is not a how to set goals article we’ll keep that part sweet and short.)

Before we look into goals though… Remember what Ryan said in the beginning, that yearning for more, better, someday is the enemy of your contentment.

What goals should we set then, so that we’re not yearning for more?

END GOALS. Not means goals.

Enter Vishen:

“Means goals are the things that society tells us we need to have in place to get to happiness… Often people confuse means goals with end goals. We choose college majors, career paths, life paths as if they were ends in themselves, when in reality they’re a means to an end. End goals are the beautiful, exciting rewards of being human on planet Earth. End goals are about experiencing love, traveling around the world being truly happy, contributing to the planet because doing so gives you meaning, and learning a new skill for the pure joy of it… They bring you joy in and of themselves, not because they confer any outward label, standard, or value attached by society. Nor are end goals undertaken for the purpose of pay or for material reward. They are experiences that create the best memories in our lives.”

End goals have happiness baked into the pursuit.

It’s probably time to ditch your means goals and create some end goals.

If you want to dig deeper and learn about Vishen’s goal setting advice, check out this 15-minute video.

Let’s close the circle.

Conditional happiness (I’ll be happy when…) ruins your chance at being happy here and now

Being completely happy now without having something to look forward to is difficult

The optimal state of being requires (1) being happy now and (2) having a compelling vision for the future

Setting end goals (experiences, following your heart) instead of means goals (money, degree etc.) will make you happy

You can be happy with what you’ve got and still have future goals. It’s not about having more, it’s about experiencing more, growing as a person and contributing to the world. It’s about not binding your happiness to some future event.

Be happy now. And then go from there.