Building Happiness, pt. 1: Creating A Foundation (Removing Sources of Sadness)

One way to figure out how to improve your levels of happiness is to figure out what circumstances make you sad and to minimise them. This might be more effective than merely trying to figure out what makes you happy and doing that, simply because it's easier to get sad than it is to get happy, so blocking sadness out at the root provides you with a kind of safety net, so to speak, upon which you can build your happiness. In other words, if you're trying to build your happiness on rotten foundations (having not yet removed and cemented over the possible sources of sadness), your happiness is likely to crumble more frequently.

Now, sadness, like almost everything, has a structure by which it operates. It's not impossible that all the things that make you sad make you sad individually, with no connection to each other, but typically there is a shared feature amongst them that makes you sad. Instead of analysing every single thing one-by-one, it's going to be more useful to look for that shared feature, and try to eliminate things that have that.

There can be many of these features, but I think it's quite likely that you can find one ultimate feature that spans across all the things that make you sad -- or if not spanning across everything, spanning across the grand majority. For me, after some thought, that feature is that which makes me feel ineffectual or useless. I think most things that make me truly sad lead back to this. Let's think of some examples.

My failure to be productive: I'm unable to do the things I want, and I feel useless.
My procrastination: I prioritise unimportant things over important things, and end up ineffectual to my own life (or anybody else's).
People who are unreceptive to reasoned conversation: all your words are futile/useless because a decision in spite of you has already been made.
A lack of socialisation: It feels like people don't need you, and you're a useless thing merely taking up resources.

The common theme, really, is feeling useless. So it seems like my sadness comes from a feeling of futility. So what's the answer? I need to more rigorously set up my life in such a way that I eliminate my feelings of futility, then from there I can seek out things that actively make me happy. We need to start from the bottom up.

I need to re-establish a strong schedule, so as to be more productive. I have one, but I need to actually stick to it. I need to focus more attention on creation, as creation is at least one tool against uselessness (of course, you can create useless things, but the act of creation itself has its potential). I need to value creation above all else. E.g., idea creation: so, reading and learning. Expressive creation: essays, notes, stories.

Idea creation is the tricky thing, though. Some things that pose as idea creation are actually just methods of avoiding actual creation. Like, some things I read and watch I'm not reading and watching for the purposes of creating ideas; I read and watch them simply to consume them. It's difficult to perfectly separate idea creation and mere consumption. It's something I need to work on, but I think the gist of it is: if this is too easy and I'm not thinking much about it, it's more likely to be consumption than idea creation, and I should minimise my interaction with those kinds of things, in order to be less sad -- (though they are a source of pleasure, so there's space for them -- but that's a conversation for the happiness building post).

I probably haven't revealed anything new to myself here. If I go back through the annals of this blog, I'll probably find these ideas in some shape or form. But anything one intends to learn deeply requires repeated reflection, so that's fine by me.