You cannot outrun unhappiness. It will get you eventually because as you try to fill your life with things that you think will make you happy, you are feeding unhappiness. Instead, stop and sit with unhappiness. Embrace it. Because there will be days like this. Sad days. Unhappy days. Flat days.
Trying to outrun them is like grasping at oil. It’s an exercise in foolishness. Instead of trying to outrun it, shift your understanding of what happiness is.
Author, James Clear suggests that “Happiness is simply the absence of desire… Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.”
How do you create that state, one which you don’t want to change? How can you be happy with who you are in this moment?
Stephen Covey talks about creating happiness by focusing on contribution not accumulation. What you can give, not what you can get.
Generosity is happiness. It reverses the desire to fill your life with things, to accumulate stuff as a method to avoid the unhappy feeling. It gives you the strength to embrace the unhappy times with the knowledge that I am a generous person, and that is enough. Maybe another word for it is contentment.
The Generosity Guy 