Self Development

9 Strategies to Stop Chasing Happiness and Start Creating Happiness

“I want to be happy.”

Ask someone what they want, and that’s the answer ninety-nine times out of one hundred. 

It was one of my answers, along with freedom. 

It’s a solid-sounding response that’s hard to argue with; who doesn’t want to be happy?

Only one problem, it’s not a solid answer; it’s vague and empty.

We must understand that happiness comes in different flavors to answer the question meaningfully. 

Understanding how to create harmony between the two forms of happiness below is critical to living a rich and meaningful life. 

The two flavors of happiness we need to understand are:

Hedonic Happiness & Eudaimonic Happiness.

Hedonic happiness is achieved through experiences of pleasure and enjoyment.  

It refers to the sort of pleasure or happiness that we derive from doing what we like or avoiding doing what we don’t like. 

Two common examples of hedonic pleasure are sex and food.

Eudaimonic happiness is achieved through experiences of meaning and purpose. 

Examples are:

  • Time with family.
  • Experiencing awe and wonder.
  • Having a mission and taking consistent action.
  • Being of service.
  • Serving something more significant than yourself. 

Both are wickedly important to the quality of our lives. 

However, most of us tend to lean too heavily on hedonic happiness.

Why?

Because it’s easier and what we’ve been conditioned to do.  

When we lean too heavily on hedonic happiness, we consistently seek out the next hit and the subsequent rush; our overall well-being is abdicated to externals.

Hedonic happiness is short-lived, and when that’s the only form of happiness we pursue, we become chasers. 

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We chase money, status, and dopamine highs from social media, porn, or binging on shows. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities.

There is, however, something wrong with them if we feel like our lives lack meaning and purpose. 

Because when we feel as though our lives lack meaning and purpose, we feel empty inside, even if we have financial and materialistic success.

It’s like a success-sized hole in our lives, and the relentless chase of hedonic happiness will only widen the hole.

“Happiness depends upon ourselves.” —Aristotle 

Hedonic happiness is like throwing sand in a sieve if we feel empty and our lives lack meaning and purpose.  

This is why it’s so important to understand the forms of happiness and the importance of harmony. 

Eudaimonic happiness is more challenging; it requires awareness, intention, and breaking free from a life set to autopilot.

It requires we ease off the pursuit of short-term pleasure seeking.

Eudaimonic happiness is a long game; it requires long-term thinking. 

The cool thing about eudaimonic happiness is that it’s sticky. 

Meaning after the experience is over, the feeling of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment sticks around. 

It ripples out to all areas of life and makes life richer and more profound; it creates an extraordinary life story and is what creates a legacy. 

Eudaimonic happiness leaves a mark on the soul. 

Eudaimonic happiness isn’t chased; it’s created. 

We create a life worth living by shifting the paradigm and introducing more actions that produce eudaimonic happiness. 

So how do we shift toward eudaimonic well-being?

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Here are 9 simple strategies to do just that. 

  1. Seek flow states.
  2. Value your physical and mental health.
  3. Appreciate and cultivate your deep connections.
  4. Know your values and aspire to live a value-driven life.
  5. Reflect on classical virtues that speak to you and put them into action.
  6. Aim for harmony, don’t banish hedonic pleasure from your life completely.
  7. Be clear about your long-term goals and aim to take daily steps toward them.
  8. Experience beauty, awe, and wonder in nature, museums, or novel activities. 
  9. Aspire to do good, to serve something bigger than yourself. Bonus: Feeling good will follow.

The goal is not to eliminate hedonic activities; that’s unrealistic and unhealthy. 

There are two primary goals:

  1. Identify the hedonic activities that suck the energy out of you, that don’t serve your long-term vision for your life, and that when you’re done with them, you wish you had your time back. 
  2. Replace those activities with eudaimonic activities so you can fill the success-sized hole in your life with mission, meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. 

A great place to start the journey is by asking,

“When was the last time you felt fully alive?”  

We must sit with this question in quiet reflection. 

What exactly were you doing?  

Where were you? Who were you with? Engage all the senses, sight, sound, touch, and smell.

When we experience this moment in exquisitely rich detail in our minds, we can analyze it precisely. 

What was significant about that moment?

What can you learn from this experience? 

Which core ingredients for flourishing can be extracted from that scene?

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When we explore this question in a meaningful way, we reconnect with ourselves and open up a new way of thinking.

One that allows us to cultivate harmony in our happiness by letting go of the chase and instead creating our happiness. 

Transforming our role from chaser to creator makes our lives meaningful again.

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  31. MELBOURNE, June 25 (Reuters) – A Rio Tinto Ltd forerunner failed to protect 18,000-year-old artefacts showing how people lived during the last Ice Age, part of destruction that the mining giant kept secret for decades, an Australian Aboriginal group alleged on Friday.

    The group said that Rio, despite pledges to improve how it protects Indigenous heritage after its destruction of sacred sites last year, did not come clean about the 1990s destruction of heritage at an iron ore mine that local Aboriginal people still do not have access to.

    Australian mining “is an industry that hasn´t behaved responsibly and an industry that needs far greater oversight in heritage protection and agreement making,” the Wintawari Guruma Aboriginal Corporation (WGAC) said in a statement.

    The troubled relationship between mining, a core industry for Australia’s economy, and the nation’s Aboriginal heritage attracted global attention last year when Rio, with state approval, blew up two ancient rock shelters considered sacred to Indigenous people in Western Australia.

    Outrage at the legal destruction featured in Black Lives Matter protests in a country where Aboriginal people have long suffered higher rates of imprisonment, unemployment and lower life expectancy.

    The furore led Rio to replace top executives and promise to overhaul its heritage protection practices.

    Friday’s claims, in a submission to a government inquiry, concern different sites in the same region, around the Marandoo iron ore mine. The group said it had learned that material dating back at least 18,000 years and other artefacts had been thrown in a Darwin rubbish heap.

    Rio Tinto Iron Ore chief executive Simon Trott said in a statement: “We´re not proud of many parts of our history at Marandoo and we reiterate our apology to the Traditional Owners of the land, the Eastern Guruma People, for our past actions. We know we have a lot of work ahead to right some of these historical wrongs, which fell well short of the standards we expect today.”

    Trott’s statement did not address the Indigenous group’s specific allegations. Rio declined to comment beyond the statement.

    The Aboriginal group’s submission highlights an Australian legal structure that has long greenlighted mining development at the expense of historically important cultural sites.

    “Any site dating from the last Ice Age is significant because people were using these sites as refuges, so we can get a sense of how they were reacting to glacial conditions,” said Duncan Wright, a specialist in Indigenous archaeology at Australian National University.

    “If you had sites of this significance in England, they would be protected – it’s like destroying Stonehenge,” said Wright, who has not seen the material. The sites could, in fact, have been significantly older, given the technology available in the 1990s, he said.

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    Hamersley Iron Pty Ltd and the Western Australia state government knew by May 1992 “that rock shelter ‘MG2’ in Manganese Gorge contained Aboriginal cultural material dating back 18,000 years,” the first evidence of Aboriginal habitation through the Ice Age, WGAC said in the submission. Rio acquired Hamersley in 2001.

    Material from that rock shelter was accidentally dumped in landfill, and Hamersley later approved plans to discard unanalysed material from 20 of 28 sites that were salvaged, it said.

    “It is a wound that has not healed – that so many cultural sites were lost, blasted into fragments, without even a record, note or photograph kept,” the group said. “Nothing remains today beyond a deep hole in the ground.”

    The group said this contravened state regulations requiring the miner to safeguard salvaged material, part of an arrangement that exempts Rio from complying with state heritage laws.

    Indigenous groups have mounted opposition to state government revisions of heritage protection laws that have legalised the destruction of ancient sites.

    Trott said Rio also supports repealing the law that created the exemption, the Marandoo Act 1992, and that “discussions with Traditional Owner groups to better understand and reflect their wishes are ongoing.”

    The Aboriginal group said artefacts in early reports had included grinding material, hearths, marine shell, bone, stone and wooden items from an area that contained numerous rock shelters, a ceremonial area and a waterhole with engravings.

    “So little was the respect for either the State´s conditions, or for the cultural heritage that was destroyed on a massive scale, hundreds of Eastern Guruma cultural artefacts ended up in the bin,” it said.

    The group noted reports of vandalism at the M2 rock shelter, including a drill rig putting a hole through its roof.

    WGAC said they remain unable to assess the heritage at Marandoo that is not included in their legal native title claim, and that Rio does not pay royalties on the three oldest of its six mines on its ancestral land.

    “It is not surprising that this sort of behaviour occurred in Western Australia, some 28 years before Juukan Gorge,” the area of last year’s destruction, the WGAC board in a statement.

    (Reporting by Melanie Burton; Editing by William Mallard)

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