It is very difficult to know what one wants and needs. Especially when you try to listen to your inner voice to find out and the thing you're observing is complex. Happiness is one such ellusive thing. I have always seen myself as a happy person but my memory of the last couple of months to years always seemed like mostly mediocre or even negative. Many things happened that could have explained that and I was getting older, life is not supposed to be frictionless after all. But I always had the feeling that this negative view on things came from the outside. For years I told myself to try changing my environment, go out of my comfort zone, meet new people and be alone to see if something would change. I didn't because disruption of your habits is always painful, your whole existence will shout at you for even considering it, it will feel wrong. Then I did and things started to change but painfully. You come to the realization that certain things just don't work, certain people are problematic, certain of your own behaviors are holding you back. You are confronted with facts and now have to act. But what if acting now involved leaving friends and family with whom you've built your own existence over years, or those bad habits are at the basis of your personality? Acting then is akin to destruction. Tearing everything apart to start a new. You might not want to do that, you might feel again that you're acting entitled or unjust towards others, you might fear that you're wrong, the future won't necessarily be better. What does better mean anyway? And your thoughts will be cyclical. Some days you're ready to backback through the world to find back to yourself one hostel at the time. Some days your life is "okay". Some days are cute and heartwarming. You'll turn to yourself and discuss what you should be doing over and over again. But without noticing you'll be talking in circes. You won't remember the exact state you're in and you won't have an exact goal to work towards. The answer is to introduce objectivity. Write your thoughts down, journal, compare yourself to others, measure. All of these actions bring clarity in your thoughts, just by doing them, via the attention you give to the framework of your existence, rather than work, success, reliability or whatever other set of values is more important for other people and society at large than your own inner life. Your inner life however is the reason why you can produce value in the first place. If you are hard working and break down next year never to recover, you will achieve almost nothing. If you figure out your problems and then happily clock in day after day in an activity you love, your contributions will compound. Job, family, friends, community, creative work - it goes for everything. Your inner life matters, for yourself and for others. One of these experiments you might do is observe your emotional response with others, platonically or romantically. It's a spicy topic because traditionally it would be considered immoral and in any case it will introduce friction to your private life. You might find out that you're sad, defeatist and hate yourself in one situation. You might find that you cannot get any work done, lack concentration or ideas. Similarly you might feel like somebody just switched the light on in your inner house, nothing can stop you, you're self-conscious, strong, disciplined in another. Have you changed？ Or are you living different situations? Or is it a hormonal response? Who knows, it's difficult, but you measure now. One of the things I started measuring as part of my journaling practice is happiness. I use a scale of 5*, with 3* being slightly unsatisfying, a slow day where I just cannot get myself to do my routines, 4* everything is fine, 5* is so great that I feel like telling somebody (or myself via my journal) about it. 2* I feel pain in my chest, breathing is difficult and I've dark thoughts about the future. And 1* I only experienced long before I took up this habit, is a strong absence of meaning and even abstract suicidal thoughts. It's not very detailed but simple enough to track every day. The details of what happened you'll retain via other practives like journaling. But the general form or color a day takes on in your memory doesn't need more details. The first thing I found out is that I am truly mostly a happy person. No matter what I remember, I'm at around 80% happiness, that is the amount of 4* or 5* days. In a rough patch I might drop to 75%. This alone lifted a weight off my shoulders because it meant that *I* am doing fine and that my brain is overly simplifying by letting me remember my life as negative. I later found out that it is simplifying the periodic occurence of a special kind of negativity. By retaining all the other things that happen around these peaks of bad vibes, that strong negative element becomes more bearable. The second thing I found out is that if I have enough room for myself and manage my boundaries correctly, my life is mostly "okay". I'm happy, I'm fine. Life goes on - and rather quickly. This is the baseline I needed to consider for the next observation. Is "okay" a good enough valuation of life? This is where philosophies, generations and cultures clash. Some will say "okay" is already great, you have duties, responsibilities, life is hard. Others would say of course not, every day needs to be exceptional, excitement, adventure, newness, inspiration. Whatever answer you or a person close to you will give to this question, is mostly a generalized opinion. Accepting or breaking away from it is not so much a matter of right or wrong, but one of belonging. Are you ready to be an outsider to your parents, your social group, your home country and people who know you best? This is again an impossibly hard situation. But my measuring you dampen the noise and focus on what really matters. You do experiments. Be alone, go traveling, hang out with specific friends, try new activities. Your happiness percentage will change. 60%, 90%, 95%... Measure it over months and years and read your corresponding journal entries. Is the change stable？ What activities does it correspond to? How are you feeling about yourself? Maybe you're like me, an easygoing person. You remember the 90+% moments as the best moments of your life. You did a lot back then, you were content with yourself. What changed? In my case what changed was a significantly higher occurence of 5* days, everything else staying mostly equal. In fact there were 14x more such days counted over equal periods. As that other situation was romantic in nature, there were also quite a few more 3* days of melancholy separation and no hope for the future. But in terms of my happiness it was still worth it! What were those 5* days like? Sex? Novelty? My projection onto another person? If that would have been the case, I'd have deemed my experiment a failure. It is not enough to feel happier in a dopamine rush. What I discovered instead was that on those days, I did mostly the same as I always do. Only that there was another person who *matched my point of view*. Of course I then imagined too much, alignment is never that perfect and compromises need to be made. Nothing came from it. But this experiment in particular had a giant impact on my private life. It introduced permanent friction into my relationship which I am able to defend, because I know the effect it had on me: extreme happiness and contentment with myself. It also showed me that I actually require something and what that is. I'm one of those people who, when asked about something or other, would always say: "as you want", "okay", "let's do your stuff first". I used to say that I don't need anything, but that's not true. I do require that you don't constantly act in different directions than I do. I'm not a sponge for negative feelings. There is an oportunity cost for me, when our world views differ so much that only one of us can enjoy their day on average. In short, even though experimenting with my emotional response to other people is a lot to ask of a partner and taking stance against someone elses personality is a fundamentally unjust thing to do, you owe it to yourself to know why you are putting up with the people you spent time with and you owe it to them to be careful in your judgement. I know that those 10% happiness matter significantly. I am an almost unrecognizably different person with them. One I prefer. I know that they are easy to achieve, namely when I can enjoy something at the same time as a person I like. And I know that there is a currency paid every time I say "okay".[^1] --- [^1]: My intuition for small differences in a measure of progress is the concept of compounding. A year or two won't matter much. But after a decade or an entire life, even more if you consider the impact on children and their lifes and so on, one more laugh, one more day well lived can be the difference between world war and utopia. It is always someone's inner drive that brings civilization forward.