THE ALMANACK OF NAVAL RAVIKANT

HAPPINESS REQUIRES PEACES

Are happiness and purpose interconnected?

Happiness is such an overloaded word, I’m not even sure what it means. For me these days, happiness is more about peace than it is about joy. I don’t think peace and purpose go together.

If it’s your internal purpose, the thing you most want to do, then sure, you’ll be happy doing it. But an externally inflicted purpose, like “society wants me to do X,” “I am the first son of the first son of this, so I should do Y,” or “I have this debt or burden I took on,” I don’t think it will make you happy.

I think a lot of us have this low-level pervasive feeling of anxiety. If you pay attention to your mind, sometimes you’re just running around doing your thing and you’re not feeling great, and you notice your mind is chattering and chattering about something. Maybe you can’t sit still…There’s this “nexting” thing where you’re sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be next.

It’s always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that creating this pervasive anxiety.

It’s most obvious if you ever just sit down and try and do nothing, nothing. I mean nothing, I mean not read a book, I mean not listen to music, I mean literally just sit down and do nothing. You can’t do it, because there’s anxiety always trying to make you get up and go, get up and go, get up and go. I think it’s important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy. The anxiety is just a series of running thoughts.

How I combat anxiety: I don’t try and fight it, I just notice I’m anxious because of all these thoughts. I try to figure out, “Would I rather be having this thought right now, or would I rather have my peace?” Because as long as I have my thoughts, I can’t have my peace.

You’ll notice when I say happiness, I mean peace. When a lot of people say happiness, they mean joy or bliss, but I’ll take peace. [2]