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Do you want to be happier? Plenty of people claim to have the secret, and it’s not always easy to know where to start. This condensed guide cuts through the noise by taking you on a curated tour through the key ideas behind popular techniques for achieving happiness, spanning from ages-old philosophical reflections to contemporary psychological strategies. Maybe you’ll find something that will help you to achieve that elusive state of joy and fulfillment.
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Eleven of the most popular approaches to happiness
We hope that exposure to a variety of approaches to happiness will help you to find inspiration and refine your own approach. At the end of this list are some suggestions for what you can do next.
1. 🥰 Positive Psychology:
- Keep a gratitude list
- Cultivate positive relationships
- Find ways to use your strengths/virtues
- Do activities that get you into a flow state
- Savor pleasurable things in the moment
- Anticipate fun things in your future
- Reminisce about meaningful things in your past
- Buy more experiences and fewer things
- Avoid the hedonic treadmill
2. 🌊 Stoicism:
- Deeply appreciate what you have now since it all could be gone tomorrow
- Only try to control what you're actually able to
- Remember you're not entitled to anything
- Learn to love doing the right thing rather than the pleasant thing
- Seek value in all that happens
- Through these practices, aim for equanimity in the face of any circumstance, no matter how bad
3. 🚴♂️ Common Sense:
- Sleep enough
- Eat healthy food
- Exercise
- Spend your time in community with people you like
- Have a pet
- Seek work that's enjoyable / challenging / meaningful
- Make sure your basic needs are met
- Try to make enough money to achieve financial security
- Save for retirement
- Marry someone you love who treats you well
- Have a fun hobby
4. ⛪ Christianity:
- Be humble
- Love God with all your heart
- Love your neighbor
- Accept Jesus Christ as your savior
- Worship God, pray, have faith
- Be thankful and take joy each day in all that God has given you
- Be a devoted husband / wife / father / mother / child
- Obey the Ten Commandments
- Don’t cast the first stone
- Avoid lust, greed, wrath, sloth, gluttony, envy, and pride
- Avoid hell at all costs
- Live for eternity in heaven with God
5. 🧘♀️ Insight Meditation:
- Follow the eightfold path
- Train your concentration through meditation until it is stable and precise (e.g., practice maintaining subtle focus on the breath)
- Use your refined concentration to carefully observe the true nature of reality, mind, and self
- Realize the three marks of existence (impermanence, dissatisfaction, non-self)
- Learn to stabilize your new experience of reality, become free from craving and aversion
6. 👨👩👧👦 Traditionalism:
- Work hard
- Marry a good person
- Have multiple children
- Spend time with family
- Fit into your role
- Remember that many others have it worse than you
- Don't complain
- Avoid vices (gambling, excessive drinking, drugs)
- Don't waste money
- Achieve stability in life
7. 👁 Introspection:
- Use psychedelics for self-exploration
- Listen to and get in touch with your body
- Engage in self-care and self-compassion
- Investigate and heal your trauma
- Find a daily practice that works for you (e.g., meditation/yoga/prayer)
- Be vulnerable around the people that you trust
- Share your true feelings
- Explore and have compassion for the different "parts" of yourself that are afraid of and desire different things,
- Investigate your "true self" and be true to it
- Learn to pay attention to your intuition
- Find a way to look at the world that resonates with you
8. 📚 Self-Help Books:
- Repeat affirmations that motivate you
- Form healthy daily habits
- Always work on becoming a better version of yourself
- Try new things
- Figure out what you really want and then plan to get it
- Prioritize
- Set ambitious goals
- Keep your home organized
- Think positive thoughts
- Believe you can do anything that you put your mind to
- Wake up early
- Make at least a little progress towards your goals each day
- Don't let fear stop you
- Don't give up
- Avoid negative people
- Surround yourself with people who inspire you and make you a better person
9. 💃 Hedonism:
- Remember that you get just one life, so you might as well enjoy it
- Live in the moment (don't worry about the future)
- Dance
- Party
- Seek out cool experiences
- Do exactly what you feel like
- Ignore societal pressure
- Have sex
- Eat tasty food
- Do fun drugs
- Spend money on fun things
- Don’t let others tell you what to do
10. ❤ Altruism:
- Give to charity
- Volunteer your time
- Choose a career that lets you help others
- Become a part of something meaningful (e.g., a cause or movement) that is much bigger than yourself
- Be generous and thoughtful
- Work hard to be kind
- Think hard about how you can do good
- Help strangers
- Build communities and projects to improve the world
11. 🌍 Community
- Engage actively in your community
- Build strong relationships
- Be actively engaged in civic matters such as voting and town meetings
- Work together with others towards collective goals for the improvement your community and its members' lives
- Take responsibility for the well-being of your community and its members
- Participate in cultural traditions
Of course, it might be challenging to decide whether and how to apply each of these different theories of happiness. If you're feeling confused about how to invest your time and energy, we recommend you to take an experimental approach: try applying some of the techniques, and see which theories deliver on their promise of true happiness for you! This tool can help you to design your own self-experiments:
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You can also find more resources for each of these approaches in our full article about approaches to happiness.
If you have some time today and want to explore the matter of happiness in a more interactive and fun way, here are a few of our tools you may like:
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Savor Your Life: Learn a skill recommended by positive psychology to increase satisfaction and deepen your happiness
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Remember, there isn't a universal formula for happiness. The attitude you have to make a happier living is unique to you. As summarized by Dalai Lama XIV:
"Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions."
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🔈 We've released a new podcast episode! 🔈
Will AI destroy civilization in the near future? Spencer is joined by Connor Leahy, CEO and co-founder of Conjecture (an AI alignment company) to talk about questions like: Does AI pose a near-term existential risk? Why might existential risks from AI manifest sooner rather than later? Can't we just turn off any AI that gets out of control? Exactly how much do we understand about what's going on inside neural networks? What is AutoGPT? How feasible is it to build an AI system that's exactly as intelligent as a human but no smarter? What is the "CoEm" AI safety proposal? What steps can the average person take to help mitigate risks from AI?
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What did you think of this newsletter? Let us know by replying to this email!
Here at ClearerThinking.org, we offer many free mini-courses and tools to help you make better decisions, hone your reasoning, and create the life you want! Here's a sampling of our work:
- Life Changing Questions - Answer these open-ended questions (alone or with others) to learn new, important insights about yourself.
- Your Greatest Sources of Pleasure - Discover what brings you the most joy and personal life satisfaction and review how to experience them more often.
- Surpass Self-Limiting Beliefs - False or exaggerated beliefs about ourselves can hold us back and harm our relationships. Learn to overcome them with three simple strategies!
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