If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy? I absolutely believe that is true. The beauty of being mentally high functioning in our society is that you can trade it for almost anything. If you’re smart, you can figure out how to be healthy within your genetic constraints and how to be wealthy within your environmental constraints.
If you’re smart, you can figure out how to be happy within your biological constraints. But your biological constraints are a lot larger than you might think.
If you’ve ever gotten drunk or achieved an altered state of mind on psychedelic drugs or through meditation, breathing or other hypnotic techniques, you have experienced brief moments of happiness beyond what you feel on a typical day.
Of course, some of this is a fake, pleasure-driven happiness. But there’s truth to it; otherwise, you wouldn’t desire that state.
Achieving these brief states of happiness can show you how dynamic your range is—and that range can be quite large.
How do you nudge yourself in that direction on a perpetual basis, as opposed to visiting it by stunning your mind into submission and silence?