How to be happy

Through not observing what is in the mind of another a man has seldom been seen to be unhappy; but those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 2, Meditation 8

We have only ever been inside our own mind. The mind of others is a mystery to us. Minds other than our own have been shaped by genetics and experience. We have not experienced the things anyone else has experienced. Trying to understand what goes on in the minds of others is futile. We will never know.

Yet we all try. We can’t help it. We try to guess what another person is thinking. We try to guess what action they will take as a result. And then we find out that they did something completely unexpected. Did we ever truly know what they were thinking? No. But we still become unhappy because someone didn’t do what we expected them to do.

Note the word expected. We expected something to happen. It didn’t. So we’re unhappy. True happiness comes from having our expectations fulfilled. If our expectation of the future is shaped by something that we truly cannot understand, we are bound to be unhappy. If our expectation of the future is based on our guess about what others are thinking, we are bound to be unhappy.

So where can we find true happiness? True happiness comes from understanding what shapes our expectation. It comes from examining ourselves. Through introspection, we come to understand that we have many hopes and aspirations about the future. Sometimes, these aren’t even things that we really need. Yet we still want them. Our current self thinks that our future self will be happy when we get the things we want.

We can see that this is a mistake. We can see in our past self these same wants and needs. We wanted many of the things we have now. We got them. Are they making us happy? Or have we moved on? We constantly want to accumulate more because we think this will bring us happiness. That is foolishness. We can see for ourselves that it didn’t work in the past. So why would it work in the future?

The key to happiness is twofold. Firstly, forget about trying to guess what others are thinking. We will never know. Secondly, truly understand our own thinking and how it shapes our expectations. This we can control. Once we can recognise what we expect, we can shape it. Moderating our expectation is the key to being happy.

Source

The content in this article is based on the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The full text of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is available here.