Happiness is such an overloaded word. I’m not even sure [what] it means. I think that peace and purpose kind of don’t go together. For me, these days, happiness is more about peace then it’s about joy. So in that sense, I think a purpose can be a little misleading. If it’s your internal purpose, if it’s your moment to moment: that’s what you most want to do, then sure you’ll be happy doing it. But if it’s sort of this externally inflicted purpose – society wants me to do X or you know I am the first son of the first son of this so I should do Y or I have this debt or burden that I took on then I don’t think that’s gonna make you happy.
I was bored.
I don’t think anybody has a real relationship with death. It’s just like this big unknown. I think most of us is ignore it most of the time. If you didn’t ignore it you probably wouldn’t function as a normal social individual, you’d probably be in a very different state of mind. I don’t fear it but I don’t think I know it. I kind of feel like every moment is a death. You can’t go back to the past and no one’s ever gone back… and even a second I didn’t remember what I said two minutes ago. At best [the past] is a fictional little memory tape in my head. So as far as I’m concerned my past is dead, it’s gone.
All death really means is no more future moment. So this goes back to the thing: literally, all that exists is this moment. That’s all there is, there is no future, that’s a fiction in your head [and] nobody can predict the future. There is no past, nobody has gone back even an inch in their past, not even a second, so that doesn’t exist. So literally all that exists is this moment so I feel like you’re dying and being reborn at every moment and it’s just it’s up to you to choose whether to forget it or to remember it.
There’s this guy that I follow on Twitter that I’ve worked with in the past and still do, he’s pretty interesting guy, he goes under “Siddha Performance” [@Siddhaper4mance] that is the handle. He basically likes to say that if you knew the moment of your death… if every human knew the exact moment that they were going to die… if there was a clock on the wall that was ticking it away… your life would be completely different it, and that is an interesting thought exercise, but of course we don’t believe it.
I installed this app in my iPhone for a while that reminded me five times a day that I’m gonna die, with all kinds of clever quotes… and I became desensitized to it like that *snaps* and just forgot about it immediately. So, unfortunately, it’s human nature to forget that we’re gonna die and [we] sort of treat it as something that happens to other people. but not to us… but I feel like the fundamental mysteries of life or somewhere locked up in death.
Haha okay I’ll end on this. I’m not always happy like anybody, but I know that when I am anxious . . . Usually with my failure mode and it’s different for everybody, but perhaps some of you are similar. My dominant issue when … So sometimes there’s a clear and present danger right. Like if you’re being physically attacked, obviously. But even less obvious, something truly shitty happened. You know like your child got hurt then you’re gonna be unhappy… there’s no way around it, that’s emotional. But 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 things and you’re not feeling great… and you’re just gonna notice that your mind is just chattering and chattering about something. And you’re just maybe you can’t sit still. Maybe you feel like you have to get up and move to the next thing. There’s this “next thing” thing right, where you’re sitting in one spot, you’re thinking about where you should be next. And when you go in … So you’re sitting down you’re thinking oh I should go get a cup of tea. You don’t get a cup of tea and you’re like oh I got to go answer that email.
The other day I said oh I gotta get to work. Oh and I need to be working out. It’s always the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, and that’s creating this pervasive anxiety. And it’s most obvious if you ever just sit down and try and do nothing, and I mean nothing. I mean not read a book, I mean not listen to music, I mean literally just sit down and do nothing. And the fact that you can’t do that is because there’s anxiety that’s always trying to make you get up and go get up and go get up and go… and so just being aware that the anxiety is what’s making you unhappy I think is important. The anxiety is this a series of running thoughts. So what I do to combat anxiety is I don’t like try and fight it but I just notice that I’ve been anxious because of all these thoughts.
So in my own way, 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’m having my thoughts I can’t have my peace. So I try to use my thoughts or try to let them run unchecked when I need to get something done. When I’ve decided it’s important. When I’ve really sat there and decided it’s important. Otherwise run away thinking is just a recipe for anxiety, which is always causing me to try and live forward into the next, into the next, into the next. It’s keeping me moving, moving, moving, and not happy, and not peaceful, and not present.
So you’ll notice when I say happiness I mean peace. A lot of people when they say happiness they may enjoy bliss but I’ll take peace. Anyway, I think that’s it for the evening, thank you all for joining. Please don’t try and take any lines out of context and crucify me on Twitter because there’s a lot of angry mobs running around Twitter’s this year. And I hope that all of you are having great lives and end up wealthy and happy.
