Internal Happiness vs Material Success

Are you optimizing your life for internal happiness or material success? Of course, these things are not mutually exclusive but there does seem to be plenty of hard working people reporting a lack of internal happiness.

So how can people work hard, achieve material wealth, have the car they want, get married, and still report to be unsatisfied with life? Most likely, the answer will reveal itself by looking at the way the person has optimized their life.

You see humans love heuristics and short-cuts to life, and focusing your life on one thing (e.g. purely earning money) has served as such a heuristic. Of course, this is done for good reason, as those who have enough financial wealth have secured the necessities of life such as shelter and food, they've also earned enough money to obtain some level of esteem and recognition, and are able to provide financially for their family. But there still seems to be something missing, self-actualization.

Self-actualization requires more than a single-minded approach to life (i.e. purely engaging in the acquisition of wealth). It requires that you optimize your life for internal happiness or internal truth, whichever terms you'd like to use to represent your self-actualization.

Optimizing for internal happiness and self-actualization will be different for everyone as each person has their own nature to develop. Some may be billionaires, some may be local artists, some may be chefs, some may be family focused, the point is that each person has to optimize their life in alignment with their true psychological self.

But sadly, many have failed to do this as the pressures of society, cultural conditioning, and personal weaknesses have hindered us from clearly seeing our true potential and identity. This is especially evident in the working lives of many people, as many report dissatisfaction with their life, and most of their lives are spent at work, indicating that economic incentive has the potential to influence people to optimize their life for wealth instead of optimizing for a wealth of life.

By Jared Chan

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Видео Internal Happiness vs Material Success канала Jared Chan