9 Mistakes You Make About Happiness

Thoughts on happiness from “The Wisdom of Life” by Arthur Schopenhauer

Parker Klein ✌️

5 min read2 days ago

Your life can be reduced to three distinct classes:

1. What you are

Personality, health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education.

2. What you have

Property and possessions of every kind.

3. How you stand in relation to others.

The light in which his fellowmen regard him

Your happiness depends on what you value and pay attention to.

Here are 9 mistakes you make which impact your happiness.

1. You look outside of yourself for happiness

Our happiness depends in a great degree upon what we are, not what we have, or our reputation.

The principal element in a mans well being is what he is made of, his inner constitution.

“The happiness we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings.” — Metrodorus

The more a man finds his sources of pleasure in himself — the happier he will be.

“To be happy means to be self-sufficient.” — Aristotle

The ordinary man places his life’s happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed. In other words, his centre of gravity is not in himself; it is constantly changing its place, with every wish and whim.

2. You don’t take responsibility for your thoughts

The source of inward satisfaction or dissatisfaction results from the sum total of his sensations, desires, and thoughts; while his surroundings exert only a mediate or indirect influence upon him.

Every man is pent up within the limits of his own consciousness.

The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.

“Men are not influenced by things but by their thoughts about things.” — Epictetus

3. You don’t prioritize your health

Health outweighs all other blessings so much that one may really say that a healthy beggar is happier than an ailing king.

It is wiser to aim at the maintenance of our health and the cultivation of our faculties, than at the amassing of wealth.

To be healthy — avoid every kind of excess, all violent and unpleasant emotion, all mental overstrain, take daily exercise in the open air, cold baths and such like hygienic measures.

9/10th of our happiness depends upon health alone.

With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable.

Good health is by far the most important element in human happiness.

4. You are too materialistic

Beyond the satisfaction of some real and natural necessities, all that the possession of wealth can achieve has a very small influence upon our happiness; wealth rather disturbs it, because the preservation of property entails a great many unavoidable anxieties.

Nothing contributes so little to cheerfulness as riches, or so much, as health.

5. You don’t prioritize what is meaningful

The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom. Life presents a more or less violent oscillation between the two.

Life is movement; it is its very essence.

The life of the mind is not only a protection against boredom, it also wards off the pernicious effects of boredom; it keeps us from bad company, from many dangers, misfortunes, losses, snd extravagances which the man who places his happiness entirely in the objective world is sure to encounter.

6. We are scared of solitude

The wise man will, above all, strive after freedom from pain and annoyance, quiet and leisure, consequently a tranquil, modest life, with as few encounters as may be; and so, after a little experience of his so-called fellow-men, he will elect to live in retirement, or even, if he is a man of great intellect, in solitude. For the more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people, — the less, indeed, other people can be to him.

7. You aren’t okay with less

A man never feels the loss of things which it never occurs to him to ask for; he is just as happy without them; whilst another, who may have a hundred times as much, feels miserable because he has not got the one thing which he wants.

8. You care too much about what other people think

To lay great value upon what other people say is to pay them too much honor.

In all we do, almost the first thing we think about is: what will people say; and nearly half the troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score, it is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified because it is so very morbidly sensitive.

9. You chase fame rather than good work

The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favorably received at first; but remain in obscurity until they win notice from intelligence of a higher order, by whose influence they are brought into a position which they then maintain, in virtue of the authority thus given them.

Those who labour, not out of love for their subject, nor from the pleasure in pursuing it, but under the stimulus of ambition, rarely or never leave mankind a legacy of immortal works.

The longer a mans fame is likely to last, the later it will be in coming; for all excellent products require time for their development.

Fame shuns those who seek it, and seeks those who shun it.