by Milton Johanides

Created on: May 16, 2009

The only way to become truly happy is to try and be miserable. The harder you try and be miserable the easier it gets to be happy. If you are already miserable try and make yourself even more miserable - suddenly the reverse starts happening. Instead of getting more miserable you start to get happier. Try it, it works every time. Trust me, I'm an insane manic depressive so I know what I'm talking about.

If you're depressed and you're reading this, then you're not depressed enough. If you were really depressed you wouldn't have the motivation even to get out of bed and read. Try and make yourself more depressed. Not until you experience the euphoria of true misery will that cloud in your head begin to lift. Still don't get it? Okay, try this simple exercise. Make that cloud in your head darker and blacker. Make it as black as you can. Feel the sides of your head squeezing your brain so tight it can't think anymore. So what are you going to do now? Kill yourself? Okay, how are you going to do that? Think about it, plan it, imagine what it's going to be like, then go through with it - in your head. Then what? You feel happier already. You feel happy because you only planned the suicide in your head and you didn't actually go through with it.

It's an old Zen concept that in order to find something you should resist looking for it. The more you try and be happy the more miserable you're going to get. It's like people who are always on the make for more money. They always end up poor. The people who make the most money are the people who didn't care about the money in the first place. It's the same with happiness. You think if you get married you'll be happy? You think if you get divorced you'll be happier? You think if you owned the best car on the road you'd be happy. You think if you stripped your life of material possessions you would be happier. All so not true. You will only be happy when you realise that you're not miserable!

The root to this mode of thought is a religio-philosophic argument that begins with the premise that God made everything good. If everything is good then we should be happy all the time. Absolutely right. So if we are miserable it is because we are not really seeing things as they really are. If we did, we would see that God made everything good and be happy about that. So the trick is to see things as they really are. The reason why we don't see things as they really are is because we have been listening to someone else telling us what it means to be happy. So instead of seeing things as they really are we have been seeing things through someone else's eyes, and that's enough to screw anyone up!

So as well as trying to make yourself miserable, try and forget anything anybody ever told you about being happy (except me of course). Suddenly things will start to seem a lot brighter. The fog has cleared. You see sky blue, the grass green, the birds and flowers multicoloured, and you can't resist a little laugh. Feels good huh? You made it. Now go and find that so-and-so who tried to fill your head with all that nonsense about being happy (Not me).

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