A few days ago I arrived at a decently good answer to a question I have been trying to answer for atleast half a decade now: How to be happy?
To add some background, I've done few hundred hours of meditation, yoga, digital detox and even Vipassana in the last 5 years to be happy. But now I realise that all these attempts were not to be happy but to feel fulfilled. Remember that feeling when you've had a sumptous snack over an empty stomach in just the right amount – neither too heavy nor too light – that's the feeling I'm talking about. Everytime I've felt truly happy, it has been on the back of a fulfilling experience.
This realisation made me feel that I've been asking the wrong question all this time. The question is not - "How to be happy?", the question is – "How to live a fulfilling life?"
The good news is that fulfilment is not some elusive goal that requires money, status, connections, yoga or meditation to achieve but a really simple innate superpower that's present in all of us and is agnostic of all our circumstances.
Fulfilment in life is a direct outcome of 100% involvement in whatever is in front of us. No matter how short the moment is, complete devotion and involvement to the process invariably brings fulfilment.
Think about all those times we watched reels but felt strangely bad afterwards? If we were actually enjoying the reels why do we feel bad afterwards? That's not because we were addicted to this cheap dopamine hit – that's the easy way out. It's because all the while we were watching those gratifying videos, our minds were at some other task, some other chore we had to do or want to do. This wandering of mind from the task is anti-fulfilment and this is what breeds dissatisfaction.
If we are working at our jobs and give it the honest eight hours it requires with undivided attention, it never breeds dissatisfaction and always gives a strange sense of fulfilment. The magic we are looking for is in the input, not the output. Since we know that input is the only thing that's in our control, isn't it majestic how the universe has tied all the happiness and fulfilment to our input instead of some other esoteric concept?
Now that we know the why, it's easier to find the how. Everyone can have a different answer here and I'll just try to share what's been working for me so far. I use a technique called Pomodoro technique to give a fair shot at giving undivided attention to the task at hand. I follow my own version of the technique which I've tried to explain below.
1. Pick a task.
2. Define what completion of the task means to you.
3. Take the task to completion in the next 1 hour
4. Jot down all the distractions that comes to your mind during the task on a piece of paper to be picked up later
5. Take a short break after the task is complete.
Last updated on June 29th, 2024.