How to Improve Your Life Without Changing (or Achieving) Anything
Happiness is overrated, be this instead - lessons from a Russian Orthodox monk
We’re sold an idea that we need to get or achieve to improve.
But the truth is, you could have your dream life today without changing a thing.
The more you search outward for things to improve your life, the further away it’ll get — until one day, happiness will seem like a pipe dream.
Don’t end up miserable. Learn how to improve your life without changing (or achieving) anything.
This is keeping you stagnant
The illusion of achievement (I made it up) is the idea that you’ll be happier once:
you graduate university
you finally get a million bucks in your bank account
you find a girlfriend
you get the car
you pay off the house
We segment life into “achievements” and feel like life will be simple once we arrive at our destinations.
But once you finish university, the euphoria lasts a few hours, and the peace lasts a few weeks. Then you’re straight into full-time work.
When you start earning more money, you realise your deeper life and personality problems remain.
Find yourself two years into a relationship, and you’ll realise your internal problems can’t be solved by patching them up with someone else.
You buy a flash car, but a cooler one drives by you. Your status is in jeopardy once again.
The house is paid off, but your anxiety is rooted deeper than that. It doesn’t give you relief.
See, we think externalities are making life hard, but it’s not so. It’s the dissonance you experience when you believe achievements will satisfy you.
You’ll never make a purchase or downpayment that’ll bring you joy for more than a week.
The Hindus say that short-term pleasure is self-centered. Although it’s necessary to feel the small wins and pleasures of life, you get no greater reward from them because you’re not contributing to anything beyond yourself.
Don’t be happy, be like Brother Stavros instead
I recently read a book called Living With the Monks by Jesse Itzler. In the book, Jesse says goodbye to his wife and four kids for 15 days to live with Russian Orthodox monks.
He was talking to one of the monks at the monastery called Brother Stavros, who’d signed up to be a monk at a young age and had been at the monastery since.
Jesse couldn’t comprehend how someone could be happy living in a monastery for that long.
“I asked Brother Stavros if he’s happy, he smiled and said, ‘Even Better, I’m content.’”
Being happy isn’t the answer; being content with what you’ve got is.
Life tricks you and tries to get you to want something else — something more.
Swapping your life for an imaginary, alternate one is much easier than digging into the details of why you’re unhappy.
“If only I were born rich.”
“If only my family were better.”
“If only I had good genes.”
If, if, if.
All a waste of your precious time and energy.
What if you had no family, were born into poverty, and had horrible health conditions?
Being grateful for what you do have while working on what’s making you feel unfulfilled is the key.
I was watching a show called ‘Love On The Spectrum ‘— a dating show for autistic people. There’s a character named Michael that I loved right away. He’s got so much charisma and speaks like he’s pulling wisdom from his ancestors' pasts.
When asked to describe the perfect relationship, Michael said:
Well, no relationship is perfect because perfection in a relationship cannot exist in any way, but you can make a relationship a very healthy, stable, loving relationship.
Whenever a person is feeling bored or unhappy in their relationship all they need to do is stop and do one thing — that everyone should do — smell the flowers.
They don’t bloom every day.
— Michael Theo
Boom. Incredible advice for people in relationships, but more importantly, for us daily.
When you’re bored of your job, your mundane routine, and your coffee order — smell the flowers:
Pay attention to your bike ride to the office and how lucky you are to have legs to pedal with.
Find peace in the decisiveness of your routine and the ruthless consistency of it
Close your eyes when you sip your coffee and try to taste the “notes” everyone is always talking about.
The key to your happiness isn’t at the top of some corporate ladder, in a car, or even in relationships…
The answer is in your cup of coffee
“If you can’t be happy with a coffee, you won’t be happy with a yacht.” — Naval.
If you can’t sit in peace with a cup of coffee and enjoy it, you won’t enjoy any of the larger pleasures of life.
Contentment comes from within.
You think if you can’t sit and appreciate something as trivial as a coffee, that when you’re presented with a yacht and millions of dollars, you’ll somehow magically develop the skill of gratitude?
You’ll be as ungrateful for the boat as you were for the cuppa.
Everything is relative, and it scales. A yacht to a billionaire is what a cup of coffee is to you and me.
Being able to release control of the world’s craziness and enjoy the small moments is the key to building the strength to enjoy the more significant moments too.
Lift 1kg over and over (enjoying your coffee), and you’ll build the strength to lift 50kg (enjoy life on a larger scale).
This is all it’ll ever be — so enjoy it
You get those mundane things right, those things you do every day. You concentrate on them and you make them pristine, you’ve got 80% of your life put together.
These little things that are right in front of us, they’re not little, that’s the first thing. They are not little, and they’re hard to set right, and if you set them right it has a rippling effect. — Jordan Peterson
The chirp of the birds, the colour of the flowers, and the sun’s warmth on your skin on a summer’s day is all it’ll ever be.
Until you realise this, you’ll be poor.
It’s the most mundane moments that create the deep happiness in life, the “in-between” moments.
Most of life is “the little things.” Greeting your partner after a long day of work, the watch you got for ten bucks at an op-shop, the picture frame your sister made you.
Again, it’s not the exuberant hotels, flash cars and crazy houses that make you happy.
It’s the coffee.
It’s the taste
It’s the smell
It’s the crema on the top
It’s the excitement to wake up and have it
It’s the way it makes you light up a little bit when you drink it on an empty stomach.
It’s the walk to the coffee shop and smiling at the stranger with your cup in your hand.
It’s the way it makes you think you should message your mother — and you do. She smiles. Message Dad while you’re at it — he’s happy too.
It’s bringing an extra coffee back for your friend — and making their day.
It’s everything that you usually wouldn’t enjoy. But it’s all there is in this life.
So, next time you’ve got a coffee — enjoy it a little more.
That’s your yacht.
If it’s your first time here, Elsewhere is a thought piece based on an idea I’ve had, and implemented, that’s helped with everyday life.
I believe the key to a happy life is mastering the mundane problems we face every day. So, my job here is to crystallise the ideas in an easy-to-understand way so that you can just read this email, instead of making the same mistakes I have.
This newsletter is essentially my life’s work, I’m proud of the ideas that I’m sharing and I truly believe it can help you on your path to engineering a better life - from the inside, out.
I send it out every Friday morning (AEST), a quick read with your coffee - ready for the weekend.
Until next time,
Eren
https://erenelsewhere.substack.com/p/how-to-improve-your-life-without
Eren, Pleasant post as always. I agree that being content is better than being happy. Yet, it is the discontented unhappy who brought us here from the caves.