I've been thinking about impediments to happiness. And I can see two obvious roadblocks.
First is wanting things to be different.
"Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something" — Naval Ravikant
If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change happens.
Sometimes this is an actual change you need to make. To leave an unhappy friendship, change from an unfulfilling career, complete a difficult conversation.
And we often will remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain.
The second roadblock is uncertainty.
"Humans never genuinely pursue happiness; they only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears."
If you feel like you can't predict the future, you will default to fear, worry and rumination. Your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape.
Worrying about the thing you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy which is way worse than what could happen in reality.
However, this imagined nightmare briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. This is how much humans abhor not knowing how the future will unfold; we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable.
Sometimes these situations overlap.
A family member gets an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them, we argue with our partner while we're apart and don't know how they're feeling overnight, we try to mend a broken friendship with a letter and haven't yet got a reply.
So, if you're feeling unhappy, look to where you're uncertain, and where you want things to be different first.
Chris Williamson | @chriswillx