An investigation into fake happiness vs. real happiness.
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Everybody has heard the phrase money doesn’t buy happiness, but clearly, neither does poverty. So what does that phrase really mean? In this video and reading we will break down the difference between fake happiness and real happiness.
You can think of fake happiness as short term happiness, and real happiness as long term happiness.
So it’s not that short term happiness is completely fake, it’s just that it’s fleeting and only lasts for a moment, nothing wrong with that.
Another name for short term happiness is pleasure. Your food, drinks, social media, video games, drugs, sex, jet skis, even hugs and puppies are all in this category.
Clearly there is nothing wrong with pleasure at all, but there is a problem when you try to get 100% of your happiness from pleasure: that’s what is known as addiction, and that’s what they mean when they say money doesn’t buy happiness, they mean that pleasure doesn’t buy happiness. Because you can have all the fame and money in the world but still have deadly anger, anxiety, guilt and depression.
Whatever your version of pleasure is, if it’s all you ever focus on, you won’t feel satisfied, and that leads to the category of real happiness, what is real happiness?
Opposite of short term, real happiness = long term happiness, and opposite from pleasure, real happiness is fulfillment.
Fulfillment is cultivated by 3 attributes:
1 it is by doing something that is difficult, or uncomfortable,
2 that is meaningful, and
3 produces value for others and yourself.
Think about going to the gym, getting through college, starting a business, learning to play guitar or anything with precise skill. Those tasks are difficult, uncomfortable, meaningful to you and they provide value to others. Whether it’s value for your employers, customers, lovers, or listeners. Those activities make you more valuable only because they provide value to others.
So that leads to another way to think of fake and real happiness: pleasure is consuming, fulfillment is producing. If you’re feeling empty and lost, this is your guide. That feeling is your indication that you have consumed too much, and it’s time to produce, time to give back and create.
Now, the more you focus on pleasure, the less fulfilling it is. The more you focus on fulfillment, the more pleasurable it becomes. Not only will the fulfillment actually become pleasure, but the old pleasure you were dependent on is now at a much higher quality, not only do you enjoy it more because you earned it, but your standards will rise.
So another good way to think about this is less quantity of pleasure and more quality of pleasure. And more quality and quantity if fulfillment is not a bad idea.
The more you spend your time on fulfillment the more fun and easy it gets. Over time the gym is less painful, it becomes downright enjoyable and you feel like crap when you miss a day.
Similarly you may reach a breakthrough in your business and get the results of a payday or the fulfillment of helping someone else.
Or now you are proficient at your art and the feeling of ease and skill at your craft is a happiness way deeper than any pleasure you can find. And when someone else loves your art? Now THAT’S long term happiness.
So that’s the two kinds of happiness, both are great, the message of this video is not that pleasure is bad, feel guilty about it and never enjoy yourself. We do not support Guilt here at the four blocks.
We made this video because we see so many people trying to find fulfillment through pleasure, and all that they’re finding is suffering. We want you to remember that if you want more results, it’s time to produce more, and consume less.
It’s important to add that you can have loads of fulfillment yet still be unhappy, you can still be miserable.
How, you might ask? Well, if you don’t know how to get rid of what makes you unhappy, you can’t enjoy your fulfillment OR pleasure.
What do I mean by this? there are four blocks to happiness, and they are the four negative emotions: anger, anxiety, guilt and depression.
And these negative emotions are created by specific and repeating thought loops that take place in your mind.
So if you don’t know how to take the momentum out of those habits of thinking, you can exert loads of effort on fulfillment yet still spend most of your time in the misery known as anger anxiety guilt and depression: and you can try as hard as you can to get as much pleasure as possible, but you’ll just end up in a terrible situation,
suffering from, you guessed it: anger, anxiety, guilt and depression, that’s why we call them the four blocks to happiness.
This is where we come in, we’ve built an entire video course on how to undo these 4 negative thought loops that make us miserable.
So if you’ve been hurting, and you’re looking for something to make the difference in your life, click the link in the bio and learn about the science of human emotions.
