infp Blog » Happiness

Happiness means burning bridges

Corin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:37:06 +0000

Watch the video.

If you don’t have the 21 minutes to watch the video, here’s the important parts:

Two kinds of happiness – There are two kinds of happiness: natural happiness and synthetic happiness. Natural happiness is happiness we get when get what we want. Synthetic happiness is synthesized happiness. It’s happiness we make when we don’t get what we want.

Natural happiness is not better – Synthetic happiness produces a measurable, testable change. People are not just making it up when they say they’re happy despite not getting what they want. The video talks about an experiment that was done to prove this.

Before choosing, choices promote natural happiness – When you don’t have to choose, having a lot of choices makes you naturally happy.

After choosing, choices inhibit the creation of synthetic happiness – When we have the ability to change our minds, we become less happy because we aren’t sure if we made the right decision. The video talks about a Harvard psychological experiment that demonstrates this.

How this applies to INFPs

INFPs have problems making decisions for two reasons:

We want to make the right choice, the perfect choice. We end up wasting a lot of time trying to gather up enough data for us to choose. This could be anything from which career to pursue to where to eat today.
After we make the choice and as soon as the first sign of adversity hits us, we start thinking that if we had made the perfect choice then we wouldn’t have all these problems. So we start second guessing that choice. Should we have chosen something else?

It’s this second guessing that inhibits our ability to find happiness in the choice we made. This is synthetic happiness and I believe synthetic happiness is real. I believe it’s real because INFPs create synthetic happiness all the time.

Every time on a forum thread where I see an INFP saying that the world wasn’t created for INFPs to successful that’s an INFP creating synthetic happiness. I see the creation of synthetic happiness in every excuse INFPs use to blame our unhappiness on things we believe are outside their control (I’m shy and can’t meet people, the world doesn’t understand me). We make ourselves better by saying that our lot in life isn’t really our choice.

Second guessing kills happiness and success

Could we have made a better choice? Maybe. Here’s the real question. How much time are we going to waste wondering if we made the right decision instead of fully committing to the decision we did make?

Success and self-esteem go hand-in-hand. When we succeed at something we feel better about ourselves. Success and happiness aren’t directly related because we can succeed at something unimportant which won’t make us happy. There’s a saying. When climbing the ladder of success, make sure it’s leaning against the right wall.

I’m talking about all types of success. Success at making friends. Success at becoming financially stable. Success at becoming our Ideal Self. However, success requires dedication and full commitment. INFPs never make that full commitment because think we can go back and make a better choice.

Success doesn’t lead to happiness, but the self-confidence we gain will keep us going until we finally succeed at something that does bring natural happiness. So if natural happiness comes from getting what we want? Does this mean we’re unhappy getting to what we want? Of course, people can be happy in the journey, but it’s the happiness we find in the journey. It’s the happiness we make. It’s synthetic happiness.

Burning bridges leads to happiness

When we have no choice but to succeed, we will do everything we can possibly do not to fail. We will work our asses off to not fail because failing means dire consequences.

When I was 19, I moved out my parent’s house. I just couldn’t live with them and their rules any longer. So with no job, one month’s rent and telling my parents I’m never speaking to them again, I moved in with some friends. I had to find a job fast, anything. I couldn’t fail because I had nowhere else to go. I ended up finding a job serving popcorn at a movie theater.

I didn’t waste anytime second-guessing my decision because I couldn’t unmake my decision. It was do or die. So instead of that energy focused behind me. All my energy was focused on succeeding. I was never happier.

Committing to choices means risk especially if we can’t go back. INFPs rarely regret the choices we made that didn’t turn out well because it makes us into the people we are. INFPs regret the choices we didn’t make because it’s another lost opportunity to discover more about ourselves. It’s another chance to become our Ideal Self that we didn’t take.

The best thing about making choices we can’t back out of, we are happier. As that Harvard experiment in the video demonstrates, we come to decide that we like the decision we made because we don’t have a choice.

Embrace the life you never planned

Corin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:30:32 +0000

If things had worked out the way I wanted, I would have been Spider-Man by now. Unfortunately, radioactive spiders are to hard come by. Who knew?

Whether you’re 14 or 40, you’ve probably figured out that things don’t always go they way we want. I didn’t get the cool bike I wanted for Christmas when I was eight. I didn’t date the pretty poetess from drama class when I was sixteen. I wanted to have my first novel written by twenty-six. I wanted to be retired by now. Things didn’t work out, but this doesn’t mean I will stop wanting.

It’s good to want things. Buddhism says wanting leads to suffering. Duh. Wanting also brought the world vaccinations and the microchip. The good can’t exist without the bad. Helen Keller said it best, “The world is full of suffering, but it is full also of the overcoming of it.”

So here I am, not deliriously happy about my life, but then not unhappy either. I’m just kinda happy. That kinda happy limbo is where I find many people existing. We got some of the things we wanted, perhaps love, family, a decent job and good friends. Other things we didn’t get like becoming a superhero or a professional ballerina. So is our kinda happy limbo just the balance between the life we have and the life we think we should have?

Let’s step back and talk about having more in our life. I’m not talking about having things. I talking about the intangibles like having more meaningful relationships or having a greater sense of purpose. Having grows from being.

For example, there are people who found great job that fit them. They didn’t walk into a company and ask for a job. They learned skills. They might have gone to school. They developed a level of self-worth as protection in case, a company rejected them. First, they became someone that a company would hire.

It’s the same with friends. Relationships in our lives reflect who we are. Friends are those people who saw something in us that they liked and weren’t repulsed by the things they didn’t like. Levels of friendship are dependent on our willingness to communicate, ability to trust and capacity to connect. Having great friendships requires that we be someone who could have great friends. In order to have more than we have now, we need to be more than we are now.

People who play lotto are a great examples of this. If we want to have wealth in our life, we have to become a person who can be wealthy. That’s why half of all lottery winners lose everything within five years. They never learned to be someone who could have wealth.

That’s also why we’re kinda happy. We’re not kinda happy because of those things we wanted and didn’t get. It’s because of that person we wanted to become and didn’t quite reach yet. This goes back to Ideal Self. Our Ideal Self has that wonderful job and that once in a lifetime love. Our Ideal Self is the possibility of more than who we are now. Kinda happy means were kinda our Ideal Self.

If we stay in kinda happy mode long enough, we become unhappy because who in life plans to be kinda happy. To get from kinda happy to happy, INFPs need to move from kinda our Ideal Self to our Ideal Self. When we grow into our Ideal, we open our lives to new possibilities. It’s in this realm of possibilities where INFPs thrive.

I often hear, people should learn to be happy with who they are now. My response is, what if they suck? Should they be happy with that?

Being happy with the way we are, is the endpoint. We stop looking for the possibilities and opportunities to be more. Every time INFPs close a possibility from ourselves, we wilt a little inside. We can accept the way we are without saying I’m happy to have gotten this far at least and quitting. Accepting means taking responsibility for our current outcomes, the bad and the good.

The moment a person stops blaming things outside themselves—the system is evil, my boyfriend/girlfriend was jerk, it’s my parent’s fault—and takes responsibility, that is a new beginning. It’s the start of possibilities. It’s the start of becoming more. It’s brushing off the dirt from taking our much needed rest at the side of the road and continuing the journey to our Ideal Selves.

It’s okay to be unhappy with who you are now. That’s not a sign of failure. It’s not a sign of immaturity. As long as we take responsibility for our unhappiness, we can act towards making change. No one is ever completely unhappy with who they are, they’re just kinda happy with who they’ve become. Kinda happy doesn’t move you. All great changes a person makes starts because they were unhappy about something.