Optimize to make your boring life fun
I’m 20,000 ft over the Atlantic Ocean and flying sky high.
Figuratively and literally - I’m en route back from London and am riding an emotional high. Travel, adventure, great food, experiencing new things with friends and important people in my life all have me feeling grateful.
At the same time, I feel immense dread that it’s done.
I can feel the reality of my unanswered emails, an unread Slack inbox, a Google sheet with cashflow numbers, and quarterly targets I know I need to hit just waiting for me the moment I land.
Sometimes, I feel the thought creeping, “I’m so happy. Why can’t my life be like this all the time?”, after an exceptional experience and it’s depressing. And it’s almost as if this awesome experience has actually made the rest of your life feel “worse” because I’m comparing it.
It’s helped me realize that I should cherish & maximize these great moments, but I shouldn’t make it my aim to live in this “peak euphoria” feeling.
Happiness V Euphoria
We’ve mixed up happiness & euphoria in society, and it clouds our world view. (Alex Becker made a video about this that partially inspired this.)
For simplicity, let’s define these two words:
Happiness = moving through life with general positive feelings. Little to no elation or dopamine. Watching a movie, or a nice dinner at home. It’s just “okay” or “nice”.
Euphoria = peak elation, enjoyment and high dopamine. Think a roller coaster ride or a night out with friends.
For now, we’ll roll with these definitions.
So when people say “I just want to be happy” - they usually actually mean they want to be euphoric. Per our definitions, this means they’re wanting to prolong some sort of high dopamine or high euphoria experience for an extended period of time.
So often, I find people, (and myself) are thinking life needs to be euphoric all the time.
Euphoric experiences are great and should be maximized in life. But you don’t want to optimize your entire life for them. With our new definition, that would be like wanting to be high, permanently on a roller coaster, or drunk 24/7 to keep experiencing bliss. It simply can’t happen. (Or it can, but do you really want to be high or drunk 24/7?)
Chasing euphoria and thinking it’s happiness is one of the reasons why when people accomplish goals in life and think they’ll feel content after, they actually just feel nothing.
I mean, think about it. You’ve accomplished goals you at one point said would make you “happy”.
Seriously think about goals you had 5 years ago that you ended up accomplishing. (Career, health, education, relationships etc.)
You thought they would make you happy. Odds are you’re still not “happy” despite achieving the goals a 5-year-younger version of you set.
So what makes you think that this time around your goals are actually going to make you “happy” when they didn’t before?
Hedonic Adaptation
That’s hedonic adaptation - meaning when we experience something great, we pretty quickly normalize our happiness levels and “great” becomes “okay” again.
For example, if I wanted to buy a house and made that a goal when I achieved it, I likely felt “great” for a short period of time. After some period of time, that feeling of “great” becomes “okay” and normal to us. You’ve probably experienced this in your life at many stages, maybe you got the job you wanted, dated the girl or guy you thought you could never get, or got accepted to the university you wanted. There’s a short period of elation and happiness - then that becomes the new normal. That job becomes “work”, the girl or guy stops being so charming, and the university loses its charm.
This is hedonic adaptation at play.
This has made me realize the goal isn’t to live euphorically all the time. Because euphoric will become “okay” soon enough anyways. A simpler goal is to make sure your average day, say, a Tuesday pretty darn good.
Why Tuesday?
Tuesday
Because it’s made up. And because Tuesday’s are usually the most average days ever. (I think I read this somewhere but not sure who to source.)
You’re also going to have probably over 4,000 Tuesdays in your life - but you probably won’t do 4,000 days of roller coaster rides with all of your friends. So imagine if each Tuesday was almost as close to perfect as possible? That’s 4,000 awesome days being added onto your life. That mathematically is going to improve the amount of positive days you have drastically.
I’ve found this to be a great razor about how I think about what actions will actually make me “happy”.
Rather than asking myself, “What is the best day possible I can have?”, which is a more complicated question regarding euphoria and involves a lot of unrealistic things that I can’t do every day (World Cup Finals, sports, travelling, exercising). Using our definition of happiness, instead, I can ask, “What does a good positive Tuesday look like?”
This is a much simpler question to answer. For me, it probably includes, writing, exercising, creative work, quality time with people close to me and eating really good food with them.
Bam. Tuesday nailed.
Rather than optimizing for a one-off euphoric monthly or annual event, I’m trying to consciously make sure the day I’ll have over 4,000 times (Tuesday) are set up for optimal happiness.
A life designed for Tuesday wins beats one engineered for one-off Saturdays.
I find this definition of happiness that involves general positive enjoyment easier to work with and easier to achieve than the euphoric definition I feel I hear from society.
The ability to find beauty in a simple Tuesday is something I’m working on.
Every time I feel myself chasing a euphoric feeling I try to remind myself it’s okay to chase it. But the peak in euphoria will be temporary. So I’m trying to keep my Tuesdays in mind and practicing getting happiness from simple things. (Because hedonic adaptation will catch up to all the peaks eventually anyways)
