how to be happy

this is a very incomplete and iterative work
tldr. good people. aggressively create value. avoid things you intuitively feel bad about. enjoy and be excited for every single second.

00 how to be happy

my definition of happiness, is to be surrounded by people who genuinely love, respect and admire us, and who we genuinely love, respect and admire. romantic partners, business partners, friends. such humans possess intelligence, energy and integrity.

the resources we have at our disposal to attract these people are our energy, attention and reputation.

along the way, simply avoid the common pitfalls which prevent the attraction of such people, such as greed, envy, sloth and dying, and we'll likely win by outlasting the competition.

01 good relationships, value creation

to attract humans with intelligence, energy and integrity, we have to create genuinely good things, such as lasting relationships, and solutions which are valuable to society. if we try to manipulate or socially engineer the results, the humans left with us, would either be willing participants in such silly games, or physically incapable of seeing things as such. either ways, they won't fulfil all of the three desired qualities. humans with those qualities are attracted to similar humans. groups of those humans congregate around solving the large, meaningful and probabilistically solvable problems in life.

to create good things, we first have to understand, and avoid bad things. why do smart people do bad things? because of greed, envy, consumption. they are controlled by wants. things that are not good long term. emptily attractive humans, status symbols backed by money instead of genuine value, cheap entertainment and distraction. all examples of short term misguided consumption. consumption is limitless, there will always be a higher sensory high. besides the basics of tasty, nutritious food, and sex for health, what's next is greed, substance abuse, gluttony and lust. the way to control a human, is to withhold what they want, even easier when said humans want the wrong things.

what are the right things? long term scalable happiness is derived from beautiful relationships with good people. creation of good things, is easier with good people. creation oriented relationships are also how we form strong bonds with them. it compounds better than consumption centred relationships, which most modern bonds are built around. eat food, consume a holiday. good for short term capitalism & incentives, but bad for individual growth, and long term humanity.

good relationships are maintained with energy, which is attracted to beautiful creations, such as children, innovation, communities and shared experience.

beauty is energy and resilience. it is born from exposing to sources of energy, and surviving adversity. a flower fits that definition of beauty in multiple ways, it has evolved over millennia, signifying it's genes and biology are capable of capturing energy, and withstanding the brutalities of natural selection. its bright colors in turn, signal a capability to provide an energy source for bees. it is same with beautiful humans and relationships, they survive generations of adversity and iteration, through natural selection, trust and resilience.

the easiest way to expose to energy is to capture new sources, the old ones would already have beauty built around it by previous humans. new sources arise from a cascades or formations of new fractals in the world, "internet moments", "chatgpt moments", usually a breakthrough in energy capture, manipulation, or distribution.

the unexpected byproduct of creating with this definition of beauty in mind, is that by creating entities that are exposed to energy, we attract money and influence anyways. when we create something that other humans genuinely want, we have influence over them. which if used correctly, can further improve the lives of said humans, which feeds back into the energy/beauty loop.

"When I was a kid, I had this notion that you could take the importance of the problem and multiply it by your chance of solving it. You know how a technically minded kid is, he likes the idea of optimizing everything anyway, if you can get the right combination of those factors, you don't spend your life getting nowhere with a profound problem, or solving lots of small problems that others could do just as well."
-richard feynman

02 resource allocation: energy, attention, hard work and health

now we know what to pursue, the next step, is how to allocate our own energy to pursue it.

a passage on hard work, by the founder of hyperliquid
https://x.com/chameleon_jeff/status/1632001035991670784?s=20

"Controversial take: hard work is more important than smart work. It's a myth that we only have a few hours of good creative work per day. Train yourself to grind long hours first. You will surprise yourself. The work naturally become higher quality, less distracted.

Train yourself to go from 10 to 40 to 100 hours of focused work a week. I did this for months building an automated trading system from scratch. 5am-10pm 7days/week 99% of people need #WorkLifeBalance or whatever, and that's great. But I'm talking to the people on a mission.

Do you really want something? Then really work. Half-assing doesn't get you anywhere. Don't look for "system hacks," or whatever, just do it. You first need the baseline mentality of going all in, or nothing else matters

Once you have hard work, everything else follows. For example, If you're not working smart, you'll be frustrated. Imagine coding 15 hours and failing to build the feature you wanted. That negative feedback will teach you all you need.

Another example: are you letting your health slip? You will literally not be able to sit straight for all these hours. But you need to, so your habits will adapt. 30 minutes a day of intense exercise. No more back pain.

The list goes on. Only you know when you want something bad enough to do it. And by all means if you don't have the drive, don't push yourself to be miserable. But when you do find the mission, let it consume your life and embrace the grind."

if you're unsure what to pursue, putting in work to discover what to pursue counts as well.

03 inversion, avoiding pitfalls.

on our journey to attract good humans, we need to avoid things which prevent us from the pursuit, or repel them. i have personally fallen for all of them, and have had to build back up.

never give up when faced with adversity. pain isn't pain until it's real pain. probabilistically, it will happen many many times, survive and bounce back. faster and better each time.

avoid greed, fooling other humans, social engineering and manipulation because it's the easy path to influence, what we gain here in fast influence, we lose in our pursuit of the end goal, which is good relationships, which require compounding, trust and reputation.

envy, self pity at unfairness, energy accrues to the winners. this will be fundamentally easier for winners of generational and genetic lotteries, life is unfair. so we should focus on what we can control. simply being born is already a generational unfairness to all the sperms that went down the drain.

distraction, attention and presence are one of the only resources we have, and the world will try desperately to take that from us. what we cannot defend, isn't truly ours. fight like hell for control over our own attention.,

by avoiding these pitfalls, which others succumb to, we win by default.

04 intuition

above all else, listen to your body, trust your intuition.

"Your body tells you the truth about your life twice a day, at the door each morning and night, by answering a question you didn't ask: Am I excited to go to work? Am I excited to come home?
If you pour yourself into work because home feels empty, you look successful to everyone but those who matter most."
-shane parrish

find something you're excited to do every single day.
find good people, that you're excited to see every single day.

create fractals that combine both, it will be hard. but the best way to get what we want, is to deserve it.

"if you have any talent, or any occupation that delights you, do it, and do it to the hilt. don't ask why, or what difficulties you may get into."
-richard feynman

and of course, easier said than done. everything said above is probabilistic, and we never know if we'll find what we're looking for. it's the pursuit that's important.

"it's necessary to fall in love with a theory, and like falling in love with a woman, it's only possible if one does not completely understand her."
-richard feynman