This Is the Happy Post

A theme I've been bringing into my posts lately is the concept that "life isn't that serious," but I need to clarify.

I find life to be inherently meaningful and valuable. What I was trying to get at in those posts was that so many of the trivial things we deal with day to day aren't that serious, yet we let them drag us down and shrink our perspective. We get so caught up in the small stuff that we lose sight of what's truly worth our time and energy, and what isn't. And a LOT of things are worth our time and energy. Just not everything.

Which brings me to the point of today: What are the things worth focusing on? What will truly make your life meaningful and happy? What joy already exists in your life, and how can you get more of it today?

Here are my tips:

• Waste time with the people you love. We're all pros at wasting time; watching hours of news, scrolling on our phones, doing things we think we should do that we actually don't need to be doing. Instead, waste your time on others. Hang out, converse, get together for no good reason. Some of the best moments in life come from doing absolutely nothing with someone you care about.

• Joy and delight are not things you need to earn. You don't need to hit a goal, finish the to-do list, or lose the weight before you're allowed to enjoy your life. It doesn't need to be saved for the weekend or your yearly vacation. Look for ways you withhold joy and delight in your day-to-day life, and add it in.

• Be generous on impulse. Every moment is a perfect opportunity to be a good person. Buy someone's coffee, send the random "thinking of you" text, compliment a stranger. Don't overthink kindness.

• "You can be a whole lot happier if it doesn't take a whole lot to make you happy" — Jonathan Goodman. Everyone's chasing bigger and better when the real hack is needing less to feel good. It's always been about the simple things, even if social media convinces us otherwise.

• Use joy as your competitive edge to drive success. We think happiness comes after success, but the people who are actually winning got there because they genuinely enjoyed what they were doing and why they were doing it. Joy came first.

• Pleasure that feels good in anticipation AND in recall is real pleasure. Everything else is just impulse. We tend to confuse pleasure with instant gratification. Pay attention to how you feel before you do the thing. Genuinely excited? At peace? Or a little too eager? Anticipating regret? Ask yourself: will I be glad I did this tomorrow? If it only sounds or feels good as you're doing it, that's not pleasure, just a craving.

So to recap: life is very meaningful and significant and full of good things, but it's hard to understand this unless you sift through all of the unmeaningful, irrelevant, ordinary inconveniences that inevitably come with it. Start sifting today.