https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFLmvRFuCG8
Yesterday was a doozy of a day. I gorged myself with food the entire morning, and stared at the ceiling half-unconscious for the first two hours of the afternoon. I don’t drink, but I imagine that was what being hammered feels like and question why anyone would ever intentionally inflict that upon themselves.
By 3:30 P.M. the only thing I had accomplished was my daily meditation session. I’d been lazy all day, and I felt terrible. I managed to salvage the rest of the day with two hours of juggling practice, a blog post, and the recording of a video, but yesterday was still a weak day.
Today, however, has been the exact opposite. After allowing myself to fall into a weird haze for the first half of yesterday I decided to start today strong. I woke up at 6:45, and have already recorded and edited a video, eaten breakfast, and am currently in the process of writing my third blog post of the day.
The current time? 11:05. That’s when I was finishing second breakfast yesterday. How do I feel today? More engaged, and satisfied than I’ve been in a long time. The exact opposite of yesterday.
It’s interesting because on one level we perceive pleasure to be exerting the least amount of effort possible. Eating potato chips, while watching Walking Dead or surfing Reddit.
I suppose that’s one type of pleasure, but it’s also a type that’s shortly lived. When you think of the top 5 days of your life do they include the Friday nights you spent watching marathons of Jersey Shore?
Probably not. More likely your best memories are times you were experiencing the breadth of life. When you went on your first date with the woman you love(d), the time you traveled to a state or country you’d never been to before, the time you and your friends started a conga line and took over the club’s entire dance floor.
Those were the best times of your life. Not the times you were ungrounded and allowing life to blow you like a leaf in the wind. Yet, the reason we still perceive laziness to be pleasurable is we’re biologically programmed to minimize the amount of effort we exert.
We don’t do more than we have to, and that’s satisfying to our DNA. However, that’s a shallow form of happiness, and what I’m going to suggest to you is that there are different “Levels of Happiness.”
On the genetic level we have things like eating, sleeping, and meeting our sexual needs. However, a higher level of pleasure exists within our hearts and souls. Contributing, learning, feeling we made a difference, loving, having fun, being adventurous, etc, and I think that’s where we’ve gone wrong.
Most people have gotten into boring daily routines that no longer allow them to experience these higher levels of happiness so they’re forced to abuse the lower levels of happiness in an attempt to manage their emotions.
What I’m suggesting to you is two things. One is that by falling in love, by being adventurous, and contributing you’ll become more engaged with life, and have a greater capacity to experience positive emotions.
Two is that because you’ll have a greater ecosystem of positive emotions you’ll also have a higher capacity to intelligently manage your lower level needs. Everybody needs to eat, but when you’re already emotionally satisfied what you eat becomes a rational decision rather than an emotional one.
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Added another post to the community section last night. Also, I’m officially on Spring Break now! I’m looking forward to recharging, recording videos in new locations (including various parts of Texas as well as Chicago next week), and doing my best to take the content here to the next level!
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