Unhappy? It May Not Be Your Fault #037

Daily Happiness Gym

Hello and welcome again to Every Dawn, where we are doing this Happiness Gym thing now for a while. We will see how you like it, and we can continue with it or we can change it again. The idea is that every day we will, like going to a gym but going to a gym for happiness specifically, see one exercise that is specifically meant to improve your happiness. All this is based on classic philosophies, nothing that I am making up.

So let us continue where we broke off last time. We were talking about Aristotle, and Aristotle has this idea that we should have the virtues, but the virtues should be in the right amount. They need to be a kind of habit; we need to have the habit of being virtuous. We cannot just be virtuous once—I mean, we can, but there is not much value in that. So the value comes from having these virtues as part of our personality, and they must be a constant part. They must be deep and balanced with the other parts of our personality so that we can, in the end, achieve happiness.

One thing to realize is that we are not entirely responsible for our virtues. To some extent we are, because the virtues, as I said, are a kind of habit. So it is something that we decide to do, that we practice, and the more we practice it, the better we get at it. So in a sense, how virtuous we become throughout our life and how happy we become (because for Aristotle, this is the same) depends on us. It depends on our personal, you know, like in a gym training sessions—the more I train, the better I become in the gym. The same with piano playing: the more I train, the better I become at the piano. And it's the same for happiness, for Aristotle. The more I train my happiness, the better I become at it.

So in a sense, it's left to us, but there are some reasons why we might be excused to some extent. As a piano player, my success depends, of course, on myself and on my training, but it also depends to some extent on the piano, right? So if I don't have a piano, for example, to practice, I cannot become a piano player, no matter how much talent I have or how much I try to practice by hitting the table, you know, with my fingers. I will never be a great piano player if I don't have a piano. If the only piano I have is an old thing that is out of tune, again, it will be very hard for me to become a professional, you know, high-level piano player.

So there might be reasons why we are excused from reaching the highest levels of our virtues, from becoming proficient in employing our virtues, and some of these reasons have to do with the environment. For example, if I am very poor and my whole life consists of having to work, to struggle to survive, to find food for the next day, and I don't have access to free education, I don't have time to educate myself, I don't have time to make experiences, then in a way, of course, I will be in a bad position. I will have a harder time acquiring the virtues and learning how to manage them correctly and how to have a balanced personality, just because I don't have enough experiences.

It's not only poverty; it can be the opposite. If I am very rich, if I am very pampered, if I have a very safe life in which I never really do anything and make any experiences that are valuable and that I share with other human beings, then also I have a problem because again, I will not be able to make these experiences that improve me as a human being. So say the child of a very rich man, which is always driven to school in the Rolls-Royce and having bodyguards and drivers and servants—and even in smaller cases, I mean, we don't need to go to these extremes—in smaller cases, a child that grows up in a very protected environment obviously will have a disadvantage over a child that perhaps grows up in a more real environment, playing on the streets, having many friends, you know, making experiences.

And this continues; it's not only about children. It continues in adult life. If I am somebody who, let's say, likes to travel and to make new experiences, and I have a job that's interesting—that, for example, I'm a journalist, let's say, and I'm going around the world, you know, recording interviews with people or filming other countries and thinking about them and writing articles about them—then my experience will grow much faster in comparison to somebody who, again, has a very quiet life, living in one city only and not making many experiences. Perhaps he has an office job, every day the same, pushing papers from one end of the desk to the other. This is me, by the way, right? I'm not saying anything bad about these people, but of course, people who have this kind of life will have some disadvantage in acquiring this ability to know which amount of virtue is the right amount for every situation, just because they encounter fewer situations.

This can be an excuse; it can also be a way to think about our lives if we want to improve our experiences. So, for example, you could now think: which are the areas in your life where you do not make sufficient experiences? Like, what are these experiences that you are missing? And if you had them, you would be able to improve in this process Aristotle thinks, you know, to become better at employing your virtues because you have more life experience. Where are you held back in your life experience?

There can be many reasons for this. It can be a lack of education. Perhaps you were not lucky, you know, in a young age to have good teachers, or you didn't have enough money for a university education. So if this is the case, then perhaps you would like to compensate for this by taking now many opportunities, you know, on the internet for free education. There are many free courses; YouTube has all sorts of lectures where you can make up for this.

Or if, for example, you say you are perhaps in a relationship that is very limiting, and perhaps you have a very jealous boyfriend or girlfriend, and these are keeping you from meeting other people, right? This is a reason why you might be limited in the amount of experiences you make in your life. So there, it would be perhaps an idea to think: how can I improve the situation? Is this boyfriend or girlfriend really good for me? Are they supporting me in living my best life, or do I perhaps have to change something in this relationship?

And there are many such factors. A country also can be a factor, right? If you live in a country that gives you opportunities, that is free, where you have access to media, where you also have job security and income with which you can buy things, then you're better off in this respect than if you live in a country that is, let's say, a dictatorship where foreign media are forbidden and you are starving because you don't have a job, right? Obviously, this second person is going to have a much harder time improving their ability to use the virtues compared to the first person.

So today, we should look, you know, at these external factors, try to see in your life: is there any way how you are held back by the contingencies of your life? And perhaps think: is there any, perhaps sometimes a small change I can make in order to improve this? Perhaps I take a day off or an afternoon off my relationship, and I say, you know, "I want to, this afternoon, I want to go alone in the park and read a book." Or perhaps there's a public library nearby where I can say, "I go to the library once a week, and I spend one hour or two hours, you know, reading the books in the library." Or perhaps I can, instead of playing a computer game, you know, listen to some lecture on YouTube.

And the more also variety you bring into your life in this way, the more different books you read, the more different things you watch on YouTube—not always the same kind of thing, but different things—the better you will be in this experience game, collecting experiences, learning from the experiences of others, and the better you will be in becoming happy in your life because you will know how to employ your virtues better, in a more targeted way.

So let us try this and tell me in the comments how you feel about this. Is this something that resonates with you? Is it something that you recognize as a problem, and how could you change this?

And perhaps—perhaps I want also just briefly tell you about myself. I don't want this to be like a lecture, but I want this to be an experience in which I'm also participating. And of course, I was relatively lucky, like, you know, many people who are professors come from situations in which there was enough wealth for them to study and to not have, you know, survival problems. So I was relatively lucky in my youth and in my childhood that I had access to all these things. So this was not a problem for me.

But, for example, I tend to be somebody who is averse to risk, and I was on a way to have a lifelong job in Germany. I had a lifelong contract in the public sector, so I was in a situation where I couldn't be fired, and I could have done the thing that I was doing forever. But then at some point, I realized that this is just holding me back because I didn't want to do this thing forever. And so—sorry, my light just went off—and so what happened was that I quit this job, and I took a job in China, where—which was a place I've never been before, and it was very adventurous for me. And I did this, and I went to China, and I'm living here now for 16 years, and I feel that this was a very good decision for myself because I changed this boring situation in which I was safe but I would not have developed further, into a situation that enabled me to do all these things I want to do.

And now again, I'm doing something new by making these videos, for example. It's something I did not do before. It requires a bit of courage; it's not something that comes naturally to me. But I force myself to do it because I know that this is something that is good for me, that is good for my happiness and for my virtue.

And so, yeah, as I said, tell me in the comments what you think about that, and see you again next Monday. Bye-bye.