the happiness framework that changed my life

What do you want to be when you grow up? I wanted to be happy I have everything i've ever wanted and i'm still not always happy I live in new york. I have work that I love to do. I have a great group of friends I have an apartment with natural light a body that works a brain that functions. So why am I not Happy, why does that sparkle come and go? Why can't I be having the time of my life on saturday and crying in cbs for no reason on a wednesday? Why can't I look around at the life that I built and feel nothing on some days Even though I built it even though it's good. I don't say this out loud often because it sounds ungrateful It feels like a thing that i'm not allowed to complain about because if I told this to my 10 year old self She would not understand the question She would point to the apartment and the job and the big windows and be like what is wrong with you But a lot of mornings I wake up and I just don't know where that feeling went And I don't know what to tell her. I think a lot of people are asking the same thing We are the most curated most affirmed most therapy adjacent generation in history by every objective measure We have the most and we're also by every objective measure the least likely to call ourselves thriving Something is broken in the way that we've been taught to think about happiness and I spent a while thinking about why? So there's a paradox of happiness and it goes something like this The harder you chase happiness the further it slips away There's a researcher named iris moss who's been studying this for a decade and what she found is counterintuitive in a way that almost feels Like a slap in the face People that say I want to be happy happiness is important to me I'm going to focus on being happy are statistically more likely to end up depressed The wanting itself is the problem happiness cannot be pursued it must ensue for most of my early 20s This was the entire thesis and it sounded right because it explained something that I was feeling the harder I tried the worse it got the more I made it a project the more it ran But then I stumbled across a youtube video at 3 a.m. One day by the big thing Tal ben shahar is a harvard psychologist. He used to teach the most popular class at harvard Which was a class on happiness and he's been writing this field for two decades His move is small but cracks the paradox open the way to resolve this paradox is that we pursue happiness indirectly He uses this rainbow metaphor if you stare straight into the sun you go blind But if you break the sunlight down into parts, you can look at every individual color without hurting your eyes And when you look at all the colors at once you're looking at sunlight You don't pursue happiness. You pursue the colors of the rainbow So he came up with a framework he calls aspire it's an acronym for the five colors So s is for spiritual. It's not religious specifically though It can be but he means a sense of meaning and purpose something to wake up for something that is bigger than yourself P is for physical. He's specifically talking about recovery. His line is that the problem isn't stress The problem is the lack of recovery Most of us are taking the punches almost none of us are letting the body breathe in between I is for intellectual He cites research showing that people who are curious people who ask questions live longer not just happier but actually longer The thing that engages you the thing you fall into the book or the movie or the rabbit hole at midnight on wikipedia That's the medicine. R is for relational the 85 year harvard study of adult development backs this up The number one predictor of happiness is the quality of time you spend with people you love and who love you back Not the number of people the quality of the time E is for emotional and this is the part I think most people miss because he doesn't mean feel good emotions all the time He means feel all of them the painful ones, too He has a line about how the only two groups of people who never experience painful emotions are either psychopaths or dead You can choose and that's the framework. That's the indirect pursuit build these five colors and sunlight follows But i'm not sure this is the answer So I got dinner with my friend last week and we had one of those like really long conversations about what it means to live A happy life She was telling me that she feels super happy right now new job that she loves new group of friends And the main thing she said that shifted for her was that she stopped victimizing herself in every situation and started taking agency and control of her life She stopped being the one in the story that things kept happening to and she started believing that good things are meant for her And this is when we started talking about lucky girl syndrome She was telling me that she knows it sounds woohoo But she really believes in lucky girl syndrome and like manifestation and I feel like I was definitely very skeptical at first But for those of you that don't know lucky girl syndrome essentially is if you tell yourself good things will happen They will what like it's hard and she's not wrong about the result. I mean something is clearly working for her She just genuinely also seems happier So I think this is where it kind of gets interesting because something is working for her, but what's actually working? I think with lucky girl syndrome with manifestation with all these tiktok trends, right? The active ingredient isn't deserving It's the behavior that the deserving generates Because here's the thing about people who believe that good things are coming They text the person they apply for the job. They show up to the dinner. They walk into a room like they own it They let themselves be seen in the light that they want to be The more shots you take the more hits you get the belief doesn't summon the outcome The belief produces the behavior and then the outcome confirms the belief You feel like the world is meeting you but really you're just showing up to the world Which is what makes lucky girl syndrome such a strange entry to this happiness conversation Spire says do the work build the five colors of the rainbow. The work is the indirect pursuit and happiness ensues from the work Lucky girl doesn't do indirect pursuit. The lucky girl pushes back on the idea of pursuit at all It says don't build the framework don't water the trees don't dig the well Just declare that sunlight is meant for you and sunlight will arrive It isn't indirect. It's anti-pursuit. It's the framework that promises the outcome without the labor Which is why a lot of people find it irresistible. Spire is a lot of work There's five things you need to focus on in your life. Lucky girl is just an affirmation You say to yourself in the mirror every morning. So now we talked about these two different engines for happiness And what ultimately is happiness, you know, I think happiness isn't a project it's weather Like you can choose where you live. You can pick a city a climate a coastline You can plant the trees you can dig the well You can make sure the windows face south you can build a life that gets a lot of light But you cannot make it rain on demand. You cannot keep the sun from setting You cannot stop a cold front from coming through in october Even if october was your favorite month last year You can build a type of life that happiness tends to land on and then you can stop checking the sky Every 12 seconds to see if it's here yet The trying is what blocks it not the trying to live Well, they're trying to feel a specific feeling those are different jobs The first one is honest, but the second one is the trap. It's the paradox And I think spire works the framework is real the colors of the rainbow add up to sunlight All of that is true But I still don't think happiness is the point Because if spire works and i'm still not always happy then either the framework is failing me or i'm thinking about the goal wrong I don't think the framework is failing me. I think I was asking for the wrong thing For my whole life. I thought the goal was to be happy to engineer a life where that feeling showed up most of the time To build a spire that produced sunlight on demand But what if happiness was never supposed to be the whole point? What if it's just one feeling out of many one color in a much wider spectrum one season in a much longer year? What if a full life isn't one where you're happy most of the time? What if it's one where you're alive most of the time? awake Reaching feeling not just the parts that look good on instagram Viktor Frankl says meaning comes through three doors What we give what we receive and how we respond to things that we can't avoid And I think what i'm starting to realize is all three doors lead to the same room, but that room isn't necessarily happiness The room is being alive Happiness is one of the things in the room. It's a chair you sit in sometimes a nice chair But it's not the room. I think if I had told this to my 10 year old self She wouldn't understand why you just wouldn't want to sit in the chair all the time She wanted the chair. She thought sitting in the chair was the whole point of being in the room And I don't think she was wrong, but I think she was early She'll spend the next 10 20 years learning that the room is bigger than the chair That there are griefs in the room that she doesn't know anything about yet that there are joys that don't fit in the chair That there are long stretches where the chair is completely empty and she's still alive Still in the room the light moving across the floor in the late afternoon I used to be terrified of the heavy stuff. I used to be terrified of pain of grief of jealousy I think I treated grief and pain like a leak in the ceiling something that needed to be patched up And it took me a long time to figure out that grief and pain. They're not a leak They're a room that I always needed to walk into the texture of being human includes them There is no honest life that skips the hard floors and only walks on the easy ones Every meaningful thing that I know about myself. I learned in the hard rooms Not the chair not the kitchen light The breakup that made me get into writing the weeks that I couldn't get out of bed I don't think happy moments make us I think they confirm us They are proof of work, but the work is mostly done in the dark So I don't think the question is how do I become happy anymore? I'm, not really sure what it is, but I think it's something closer to how do I feel the most alive? The chair and the room around it the happiness and the grief and the boring tuesdays the breakups the kitchen windows All of it the whole room. I think I was asking the wrong question for a long time I think a lot of us still are and we're all just still figuring it out