On Useless Advice and Other People's Values

What’s genuinely hard is figuring out what counts as happiness for you, personally. Social media tears us into pieces, where everyone looks more successful than the next. We’re trained to feel how much is still missing before we get to taste the real fullness of life. We run into friends and acquaintances who tell us how wonderfully they’re supposedly living, and hand out unsolicited advice on how we, too, could become “more successful and happier.”

As the saying goes: every frog praises its own swamp.

Honestly, I know only a handful of people who have truly found their path and are happy on it. And they’re the last ones you’ll hear that kind of advice from. More often, the lecturing comes precisely from those who haven’t found themselves yet — who are still in doubt, or even in despair. Their reasoning is addressed, in fact, not to us but to themselves. A kind of rhetorical conversation aimed in our direction.

There’s an endless number of combinations of goals, drives and values: money, power, fame, love, depth of connection, trust, loyalty, science, self-realization, and so on. Each of us is unique in our own mix. And the modern world is a marketing machine selling us other people’s goals and a “happiness” supposedly inseparable from them. These values were picked out and pushed onto us by groups of people who happen to be the beneficiaries of the goods, services and work aimed at “achieving” them. “Buy this and you’ll be happy, and then buy that too.” If we don’t manage our own values and dopamine reactions, someone else manages them for us.

The force of social proof works on us as well: it seems to us that everyone needs the same thing, and we feel the pressure — and a quiet fear of being judged — if our views differ from the crowd.

One evening at dinner I got carried away with that toxic teacher role myself, foaming at the mouth as I told a friend what heights he could reach if only he did this and that, drawing on my own experience. It was a sincere impulse. But he answered me: “You know, I’m just happy here and now. I’m fine with everything.” And… that was probably the moment I realized that everyone has their own path. No one is obliged to chase my values when they already have their own.

Ambition and achievement are wonderful! But we can’t be everywhere at once. Chasing other people’s goals, we risk losing what’s dear to us. Focus is everything.

Here’s to finding your own happiness and never trading it away for someone else’s ideals! 😎