[[Notes]] - Topics: [[Happiness]] - People: [[Mo Gawdat]] - Source: https://youtu.be/EO_anHpkT9s?si=XY3beZNN--KBBHsV --- ## Summary - [[For so many people, being a victim is an interesting place to be.]] Being a victim absolves you from responsibility for your own happiness, but also disempowers you from being able to choose your outcomes. - Physiologically, anger only lasts 90 seconds. After 90 seconds, there is a narrow gap where we can choose. Either to move on or to restart the cycle of anger. - [[Absolute happiness is not a choice. Nobody's ever always happy.]] - Throughout your day, and throughout life, your happiness can fluctuate between high-point and low-point baselines. - You can choose to incrementally make your low-points better, enabling you to [[You rise to the level of your ambition. You fall to the level of your systems.]] ## Notes ### Response - Every time Mo talked about happiness being a choice, he loses subscribers - 8% to be precise. - Mo created "Solve For Happy" like he would software. He released a beta version of it online, which was refined over time based on feedback. - He lost readers on page 11 - the page where he first exclaimed that happiness was a choice. ### Being a victim - "[[For so many people, being a victim is an interesting place to be.]]" - As children, being a victim (e.g. fake crying), encouraged our care givers to take care of us. That felt good. "There's a utility to that". - "Some of our problems with happiness is that most of us chose not to go beyond 6." - "If life is challenging, we can cry for mommy, but mommy won't show up if my boss is annoying." - "When you're stuck in that space, for some of us there's a utility... I'm the victim which means I have no responsibilities for my unhappiness." - There's an interesting comfort in offloading difficulty and responsibility onto someone or something else. ### Loops - It's possible to compartmentalize negative loops when you want to, or need to, focus on something else. When that more important something else is completed, it's almost natural for the negative loops to return and reply themselves. - The ability to pause, if only for brief moments in time, indicates that sitting in negativity is a choice. Therefore, happiness too, can also be a choice. - Neurologically, and physiologically, the amount of time you can hold your anger, is 90 seconds. - For people who experience anger for years, they regenerate these physiological anger responses every 90 seconds. - "You can make it much worse. We're very creative... Every 90 seconds." - In between stimulus and response, there's a gap. In that gap, you can choose to continue dwelling or to let go and move on. ### Absolute happiness - "[[Absolute happiness is not a choice. Nobody's ever always happy.]]" - When you experience extreme trauma, it's not the same ease of finding happiness compared to relative objectively everyday inconvenience of life. For example, losing a loved one vs. forgetting to turn the lights off. - Within an instant, your baseline for absolutely happiness can become your baseline for absolute sadness. - When your baselines, you can make a choice to stay or to progress. To make things slightly better. - You may never return to a high point of absolute happiness. But you have the choice to make the baseline incrementally better. That is a choice that everyone has.