Hey friends đź‘‹,
Welcome to the inaugural of “Monday Musings”!
This isn’t your typical newsletter. It's a place where I (and hopefully some guests down the line) will share what I've learned or my thoughts on various topics—some might even be controversial. Each week, you can expect a mix of articles, essays, and quotes on psychology, science, politics, or whatever else catches our interest.
I’m keeping things real and laid-back here. This newsletter is going out to a “select few” who I believe are insightful and anything but dull. I hope you'll join me on this journey.
The goal is to build a community open to all kinds of discussions and opinions. Let’s get started!
“Enough is elusive because when you reach it, you’re no longer the person that once desired it. Once you occupy an entirely new world, that prior version of yourself is largely inaccessible.”
The Many Worlds of Enough by Laurence Yeo.
Have you ever stopped mid-laugh to worry about an upcoming exam? Same here! It's like trying to figure out happiness as a teenager is some unsolvable puzzle. Imagine this: you're having a great time with friends, and suddenly, a little voice in your head goes, "Is this really what happiness is all about?" And just like that, the joy feels so temporary.
This got me thinking about how our quest for happiness can be pretty confusing. So, naturally, I turned to Google to find a guaranteed formula for happiness. What I found was fascinating: like success, happiness isn’t something you chase. It’s something that comes as a byproduct of dedicating yourself to something bigger than yourself.
This led me to another question: if there’s no direct path to happiness, how do we actually get there? The answer, I discovered, is beautifully explained in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book "Flow."
This week's story is a snippet from "Flow," where he talks about the roots of discontent and the true essence of happiness.
The foremost reason that happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind. It is almost immeasurable huge, and most of it is hostilely empty and cold. This world is spartan and is a setting for great violence. Only the fittest one survives. Natural processes(Chaos) do not take human desires into account. They are deaf and blind to our needs. A meteorite on a collision course with New York City might be obeying all the laws of the universe, but it would still be a damn nuisance. The virus that attacks the cells of a Mozart is only doing what comes naturally, even though it inflicts a grave loss on human- kind. “The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly,” in the words of J. H. Holmes. “It is simply indifferent.”
There is not much as an individual we can do to change the way our universe operates. In our lifetime, the majority of us exert little influence over the forces that interfere with our well-being.
It is important to do as much as we can to prevent nuclear war, to abolish social injustice, and to eradicate hunger and disease. But it is prudent not to expect that efforts to change external con- ditions will immediately improve the quality of our lives.
How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.