Chasing happiness is trying to keep ourselves sustained by “positive” life events, rather than adjusting the baseline as a whole. Motivating ourselves with the hope of achieving a sustained feeling of “good” is not only unhealthy, it’s impossible.

Chasing Happiness

You generally spend more time thinking about your life than you do actually living it. You've replaced "reflection" with "experience" and wonder why you feel unfulfilled.

Thinking About Life vs Actually Living

As C. G. Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” When it comes to building the lives we want to lead, we’re taught to start constructing from how we imagine we want things to look.

Make the Unconscious Conscious

You don’t need to have every answer, nor will you ever have every answer.

Getting Answers

It’s interesting to think about how we make people who used to be everything into nothing again. How we learn to forget. How we force forgetting. What we put in place of them in the interim.

People Come and Go

You don’t want what you want; you want what you’ve known. We are literally incapable of predicting an outcome that is out of the realm of what we’ve known previously.

Desire: Wanted vs Known?

Half-truths have to be made sense of. The genuine things, the best things, the "most right" things, truly just are. If it's in your life, there's something to be learned from it. The process of unlearning the reasons to justify the illusions is how you reacquaint yourself with the voice that doesn't use words. It's ultimately why you choose to get lost in the first place.

Illusions Have to be Justified

Ironically though, the opposite of pain isn’t joy–it’s acceptance.

Pain vs Acceptance

Note to self, "I don’t owe anybody an apology for disagreeing with them."

It's Okay to Disagreeing with People

The only thing that changes you and your life is the awareness of the parts that are not “I.” It is the whole, it is where you end up, it is where you began, it is the one thing, the only thing, that shifts, and raises, and facilitates the spark of awareness that made you question the elements of its vessel.

Awareness of the Parts that are not "I"

The solution to most of your problems is just changing the way you think about them.

Our Thoughts vs Problem

Logic allows you to see objectively; passion is subjective and consuming.

Logic vs Passion

Self-esteem is not how much confidence you have in how well people perceive you, but how much confidence you have in whether or not you can manage your life.

Our Self-Esteem

Manners are cultural social intelligence.

The Power of Manner

They (socially intelligent person) do not try to inform people of their ignorance.

The Socially Intelligent Person

Creative people are depressed for a reason. The expression and experience of negative emotions are correlated with activation in the right frontal cortex (as well as in other structures such as the amygdala) or in other words, the same areas that are activated when consistently being creative and putting abstract meaning to the concrete reality of whatever your current experience is.

Creative People and Depression

A capacity to feel joy must be balanced by a capacity to know pain. Our world is born of, and exists because of, duality.

Joy vs Pain

Imagine it outside of you. You would not look at your heart and think: “This is me.” You think: “That is my heart.”

Feel Your Heartbeat

Be your worst enemy so nobody else can be. Assume the worst so nobody can surprise you with it. Call it being realistic.

Being Realistic

The notion that thoughts create reality is more than just a nice idea; it's also a fact of evolution. Many of the world's "best" people understood that to change their lives, they had to change their minds. If you consciously learn to regard the "problems" in your life as openings for you to adopt a greater understanding and then develop a better way of living, you will step out of the labyrinth of suffering and learn what it means to thrive.

Why You Should Read This Book

Suffering teaches us that trying to change the external world to be happy is like trying to change the projection on the screen rather than the projector that’s playing it.

A Lesson from Suffering

Psychologist Robert Thayer argues that moods are created by our habitualness: how much we sleep, how frequently we move, what we think, how often we think it, and so on.

Moods are Created by Our Habitualness

Here a few reasons why we reject positivity:1. We see it as naive.2. We're constantly reinforcing our subconscious belief in the negative.3. We are more inherently fascinated by the negative in the world because we do not understand it.Because we do not understand the purpose or reason for pain and negativity, we find it unknown and mysterious, therefore, more crucial to attend to. We’re fascinated by the intensity of something we don’t understand, so we end up fueling it more and more simply by paying attention to it.

Why We Reject Positive Thinking?

Your concept of self is an illusion (and construct) as well.

Concept of Self

Learn to differentiate what’s actually happening from what you’re currently thinking about. Realize that thoughts are illusions, but powerful ones. Stop pretending you know what other people are thinking. Stop pretending you know what the future holds, indefinitely.

Our Thoughts vs Reality

Over the past few years, Brianna West has gained renown for her deeply moving, philosophical writing. This new compilation of her published work features pieces on why you should pursue purpose over passion, embrace negative thinking, see the wisdom in daily routine, and become aware of the cognitive biases that are creating the way you see your life. Some of these pieces have never been seen; others have been read by millions of people around the world. Regardless, each will leave you thinking: this idea changed my life.

"Over the past few years, Brianna Wiest has gained renown for her deeply moving, philosophical writing. This new compilation of her published work features pieces on why you should pursue purpose over passion, embrace negative thinking, see the wisdom in daily routine, and become aware of the cognitive biases that are creating the way you see your life. Some of these pieces have never been seen; others have been read by millions of people around the world. Regardless, each will leave you thinking: This idea changed my life."--provided by publisher.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Brianna Wiest is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Brianna Wiest has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Brianna Wiest's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Getting Answers

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