Better's Blinkist

The freedom of individualism makes many people feel adrift, leading them to focus on the pursuit of material success.

Feeling driftless in the open sea of an individualistic society, many young Americans feel desperate to find something to which they can anchor themselves. And that something often ends up being their professional lives. They try to find positions in companies that will provide them with a clear sense of structure, like the one they experienced at school. Go to work, put in long hours, please your bosses, gain promotions and achieve higher levels of status and wealth. This is the way of life that they embrace – a life of workaholism. And in pursuing status- and wealth-oriented ambitions, people are climbing the first mountain: the mountain of worldly success. Climbing the first mountain gives people a sense of purpose and direction, but it’s an unreliable path to fulfillment that ultimately comes at a great cost, as we’ll see in the next blink.

7 June, 2019 05:37 Share

The pursuit of material success eventually hits a dead end.

summit

7 June, 2019 05:38 Share

Maybe you get knocked off the slope by some terrible event in your personal life, such as losing your job, getting divorced, developing a disease or experiencing the premature death of a family member. Or maybe you just get weary and decide to jump off the mountain rather than continue trudging onward. Perhaps you’re one of those people who reaches a breaking point with a meaningless-seeming job and simply walks away from it, never to return. Either way, you end up in the valley between the first and second mountains. The valley is a place of loss and suffering. Whether you lose a job, a loved one or some aspect of your health, you also lose your sense of direction, meaning and stability in life, which further deepens the pain you feel as a result. How do you ease your suffering? Well, some people try to blot it out with palliative activities like drinking, but these are only temporary solutions that create further problems of their own. A healthier response is to lean on friends and family members for support, whether by way of a sympathetic ear, kindly words of advice or simply a nice meal together.

7 June, 2019 05:40 Share

As an ultimate goal of life, happiness is a flawed objective.

from the standpoint of individualism, the precise answer to that question depends on the individual’s personality. For one person, it could be a life of adventure. For another, it could be fame. But there’s a general desire that underlies most answers: in one way or another, we all just want to be happy. That might sound like a reasonable motive, but there’s a problem with it, and the problem lies at the heart of the phenomenon of happiness itself. Basically, when you feel happy, it’s because you’ve achieved one of your goals or fulfilled one of your desires. You earned that diploma. You got that promotion. You ate a delicious dinner. Happiness ensues, but not for long, because the afterglow of achievement and fulfillment soon fades away. Happiness is a temporary state. You achieve a goal or fulfill a desire, you feel happy for a little bit, the happiness dissipates, and then it’s time to move on to the next goal or desire. Thus, a life dedicated to the pursuit of happiness becomes a life of ceaselessly hopping from one short-lived episode of satisfaction to another, with long stretches of dissatisfaction in between.

7 June, 2019 05:42 Share

Instead of self-centered success and happiness, a life of service leads to self-transcendence and joy.

transcendence

7 June, 2019 05:45 Share

But it gets even better. To the limited extent that you’re giving up on happiness, you’re also replacing it with something far more fulfilling: joy. What’s the difference between the two? Well, joy is a deeper, more permanent emotional state than happiness. And unlike happiness, it’s not about self-satisfaction or self-aggrandizement. On the contrary, it’s about self-transcendence. That means forgetting about yourself, focusing on others, finding delight in them, giving your time and energy to them, and making their lives better in the process of doing so. This will amplify your delight even further, since you’ll feel uplifted by seeing other people get uplifted.

7 June, 2019 05:45 Share

The Dalai Lama provides a vivid image of what joy looks like. The author was once at a dinner with him, and the most striking aspect of the man wasn’t the wisdom of his words, but his laughter. Periodically, he’d just start laughing for no apparent reason; he was simply so full of joy that he couldn’t contain it. And his laughter was contagious. The author couldn’t help but laugh along with him, even though there didn’t seem to be anything to laugh about!

7 June, 2019 05:46 Share

Living a life of service requires hard work, and a love for humanity alone is not enough to pull you through.

And whether it’s maintaining deep, healthy and loving relationships with our friends, family or romantic partners, there are many additional problems to be solved in our personal lives as well, such as working through communication issues and finding the time for others in today’s hectic world. If you believe in a monotheistic religion, you’ve also got another problem on your plate: living a life of service to others while simultaneously living a life of service to God and your religious community. No pressure, then!

7 June, 2019 05:49 Share