The goal of all life is death. – Sigmund Freud
The goal of all life is to have a ball. – Albert Ellis
Nothing important comes into being overnight; even grapes or figs need time to ripen. If you say that you want a fig now, I will tell you to be patient. – Epictetus
It is not uncommon for humans to experience mild depressive states. They function well but are aware something is missing. They report they are unhappy, do not experience sufficient joy, and their lives lack meaning. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is one of the few CBT therapies that aims not only to help you overcome emotional disturbance but also to help you achieve greater life satisfaction, joy, happiness, and personal meaning. It can do this because it is philosophical and not merely a therapy aimed at treating a psychiatric disorder. Albert Ellis, the originator of REBT, was intrigued by the topics of happiness and love. At 23, he wrote an unpublished manuscript 118 pages in length titled “The Art of Not Being Unhappy.” His initial doctoral dissertation at Columbia University was titled “A Study of the Love Relationships of Women.” His hobby was philosophy, and he used this knowledge to create his new therapy aimed at helping people address the problems that undermine their happiness in life. I have drawn upon ideas found in that 1936 unpublished manuscript, the conversations I took part in during several years of supervision when he was training me, and added my REBT-based thinking to write this piece.
Setting the stage for joy and happiness by eliminating emotional disturbance
To address your problem of unhappiness and lack of joy using the philosophy of REBT, make your first goal mastering the art of how not to disturb yourself. Although learning the art of not disturbing yourself is not sufficient for experiencing significantly more happiness and joy, it stands to reason that you cannot have a good deal of happiness and joy if you are experiencing many unhappy moments. In other words, you can make yourself unhappy quite easily at any stage of life and have to start there in your quest to find happiness and joy. Actively work not to yield to this all too human impulse to disturb yourself. To avoid making yourself unhappy on a day to day basis, keep the following in mind:
Unconditionally accept yourself
Distinguish between unconditional self-acceptance, which is healthy and the foundation of moving towards a happier existence, and conditional self-acceptance, the foundation of anxiety, shame, guilt, and depression. Come to appreciate the pernicious human tendency to accept yourself conditionally. Your nature as a fallible human is to think in crooked ways, and conditional self-acceptance is a prime example of such crooked thinking. Be vigilant for such thinking and take action when you have noted a mental slip of reasoning. You are human, and although you have the capacity to reason properly, you will often fail to do so. You engage in erroneous reasoning quite “naturally.” It is human nature to do so, and the result is emotional disturbance or unhappiness. All humans do this from time to time. Discipline your mind. Work on cultivating greater consistency in proper reasoning about your traits and behaviors which compose your “self.” Such discipline will lay the foundation for your happiness. It will take a great deal of effort. It is achievable, so do not conclude proper reasoning does not work for you. You will need to get better at doing this before you feel the impact on an emotional level. When that emotional impact occurs, you will notice it and see you are making progress.
See how because you are a fallible human, conditional self-acceptance will inevitably lead to non-acceptance of yourself, self-rejection, and feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness. REBT can help with this form of emotional suffering.
Understand the different reasons why it is invalid to place conditions for accepting yourself. Go over these reasons often, perhaps daily, until you start to experience genuine unconditional self-acceptance and observe yourself feeling healthy feelings and acting in healthier ways. One sign of progress is that you will begin to get out of your social comfort zone and take calculated risks in life. You will live shamelessly. Living without shame does not mean you will not consider what others think of you, but you will be free to act in your life without their approval or consent.
It is invalid to place conditions on accepting yourself because your nature is to be fallible. Regardless of how you try to do well and avoid errors, you will come up short in different ways, in different situations. You have your strengths, but because you are human, you also have your weaknesses. Having good and relatively poor characteristics is the case for all of us. No single strength or weakness is a valid way of defining human worth or worthlessness for any person. When we think crookedly, we select a portion of our total self and define ourselves in terms of that portion. Thinking along these lines is invalid and arbitrary reasoning.
Also, take note that you are in a state of change, an evolving being. In theory, you could only validly rate your actual value at the end of your life by doing a comprehensive analysis. There would be so many aspects of you to evaluate. Conclusion: there would be countless actions, decisions, and many traits (emotional, intellectual, physical) that would make this lookback analysis impossible to do thoroughly. Furthermore, what would this lookback analysis accomplish once you were no longer alive? Instead, consider possible good deeds, many successes, and failures of your life are yet to come. See that you may be able to modify some of your traits. Aim for characteristics you wish to improve and find most interfering with your goals and happiness. You will be unable to perfect yourself, so judiciously pick those traits you will strive to modify. Work consistently in your effort to change to achieve greater satisfaction and moments of joy and happiness.
Reflect on how non-acceptance and self-rating will lead to negative feelings and emotional disturbance. Consider how it undermines your goal of maximizing happiness and joyful moments.
Unconditionally accept life
See that it makes no sense to demand that life be as you would preferably like it to be; you are not sufficiently powerful to dictate all the conditions of life. Strive to achieve, obtain, or influence specific areas of your life to get more of what you want. Become good at accepting you will often fail and be unable to get what you want, and you do not have to make yourself miserable when you fail to shape life to be as you want it to be.
Keep your preferences for how your life could be and strive to make it so; use your healthy negative feelings to motivate you to change what you can change in your life. The healthy feeling of disappointment you experience when you want something and fail to obtain it will inspire you to think creatively and try again to get what you want. Keep trying. Life takes time. It can be a struggle, but you can bear the effort when the goal is worth it and will lead you to experience joy and happy moments.
Seek to control what is under your control. Note that your attitude towards the challenges of life and your ability to reason, actively test hypothesizes, use experimentation and the scientific method to solve problems, and find your way through life are all within your domain of choice. Learn to be good at using the scientific method. It is a gift humans have at their disposable. Use this gift. It will help you find what you are looking for to a large extent. Accept the effort experiments take and the calculated risk they will involve. You will never have assurance in advance that your experiments will always turn out as you wish with favorable results. You would be well advised to accept this. Keep experimenting.
Unconditionally accept others
You are a social being. People will be part of your life from start to finish. Other humans are a critical aspect of the environment in which you live. Do not isolate yourself from them as that is not the solution to interpersonal conflict. Keep adding to your group of friends. You never know what lies around the bend in life, and you can never have enough friends to help you in difficult times and to help you enjoy life to the fullest. Strive to have healthy relationships and reactions to friends, family, colleagues, and strangers. Strive to put yourself first and others a close second, not a distant second. Do not fear people. You were made to interact with others and live in harmony with them. Learn how to do this well by controlling your reaction to them rather than attempting to change and control them. When they misbehave, ask them not to do so. If you find it difficult to assert yourself learn to do so by pushing yourself and experimenting with asking for what you want and saying no to them when you do not want to go along. You want their approval but realize you can live without it. You have a right to assert yourself with others, so exercise this right. When they continue such misbehavior exercise, you have a choice to anger yourself or not to anger yourself. Choose not to anger yourself by unconditionally accepting them as fallible humans. You do not have to put up with their behavior. With healthy feelings of annoyance, displeasure, disappointment, decide on continuing a relationship with them if this is in your long-term best interest, even if they from time to time misbehave towards you. Recognize that you and all other people are fallible, and relating to people will inevitably involve tolerance of their foibles and misbehavior. Tradeoffs will be inevitable. Work on learning to change yourself instead of changing other people. You have a much better chance of helping and changing yourself than changing other people.
Developing the discipline not to disturb yourself will set the stage for happiness, joy, and meaning in life. Failure to cultivate unconditional self, unconditional other, and unconditional life acceptance while expecting to experience joy and happiness in life is folly. Happy states and moments are mutually exclusive of unhappy states and moments.
Actively doing that which facilitates happy and joyful moments and experiences
Discover what you like and have realistic expectations
Recognize that you are an individual and will have individual tastes for people, places, things, and activities. Recognize that happiness is not an ever-present state of feeling. Strive to feel engaged with what you are doing when you are doing it. Accept a “happy and joyful life” is not realistic, while a life with many happy and joyful moments and experiences is much more realistic. When you encounter an obstacle, refuse to disturb yourself, as disturbing yourself is incompatible with experiencing a happy state. Then realize that you will have to discover what will produce more satisfying conditions for you. We come to develop tastes, and we do this through trying new things, going to new places, interacting with new people. Be sure to travel and discover new ways to doing, living, and thinking. Do not be afraid to experiment. The human ability to experiment is a gift. Use this gift.
Accept that discovery of what will bring you happy states, moments of joy, and personal meaning will require more than one experiment. Sometimes we need to develop a critical mass of skills before an activity becomes rewarding. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Every artist was first an amateur.”
Apply the principle of unconditional life acceptance to this aspect of your existence. It would be great if we were born proficient in our hobbies, pastimes, and vitally absorbing interests, but we are not. Give yourself sufficient time to experience a new activity and develop some skill at doing it before you decide it is not for you and try something else. Seek experienced teachers and coaches and allow them to guide you to proficiency. Be a teachable student. Be open to their teachings and implement them even when their instruction is a struggle to implement. Do not demand instant results and quick rewards for your efforts. Mastery and the pleasure that comes with it takes time. Accept this.
Take calculated risks and fall back on unconditional self-acceptance
Recognize that to maximize happy states and joy states, calculated risk-taking is necessary. Allow yourself to try new things knowing that some new experiences will not work out as planned. You cannot discover new joys without trying new things, being with new people, going to new places. Then if a particular risk does not work out as you hope, you can fall back on unconditional self-acceptance and unconditional life acceptance. You learned something in the process of taking that calculated risk. Carry that learning forward and go on to the next experiment and future calculated risks. Playing life too safe will not help you experience moments of joy and happiness.
Accept that over your lifetime, you will need to adapt and adjust as life changes. Do not be afraid to evolve as a person. If you were a tennis player as a younger person and you grew older, tennis may not be feasible as it once was. Do not despair—experiment with what is feasible in life at various stages of life. Learn to adapt. Adaptation is a key to maximizing happiness in your life. Adaptation may be a bit of a struggle at first, but it is not unbearable. It is worth doing if you wish to experience some degree of happiness even when circumstances are difficult. Be open to what life has to offer. You cannot have a happy life as that is too much to ask. However, you can maximize the frequency, intensity, and duration of your happy and joyful moments by doing what I am suggesting in this piece.
Have a mission or missions in life
Think about having a mission and generating art. Wikipedia defines art as:
Art is a diverse range or product of human activity involving creative imagination to express technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art, and views have changed over time.
It does not matter what human activity your creative imagination is drawn to and finds rewarding. As long as the activity is not illegal or harmful to yourself or others, what matters is that the activity is meaningful to you. Have at least one main mission in life. My mission is to help people through the philosophy of REBT. I have other interests (i.e., language, Greek mythology and Latin) and pastimes like walking, listening to music, taking photographs, enjoying good food, enjoying conversation with friends, studying various philosophies, reading current events, and traveling. Discover what is meaningful to you through experimentation. I thought psychotherapy would be my mission in life, but I had to give it a go before discovering I was right. Along the way, circumstances forced me to adapt. I had to briefly experiment with two other career choices before finding out that although these were interesting activities for a short period, my true calling was helping people learn to make themselves happy. When one mission ends, embark on another. Repeat until the end of your days.
See life as an opportunity to enjoy yourself not prove yourself
Life is short, and it is an opportunity to enjoy many moments of it. However, we have to work at creating these moments. Do not be afraid to take calculated risks. Do not do what others want you to do and live your life to prove to them that you can do something. Remember it is your life and you are responsible for it and the pleasure you derive from it. Experiment with what you may like, and when you fail, you fail. So be it. You will fail, but you never are a failure. You remain what you were from the start, a fallible human. Accept this obvious fact. Resist the human tendency to engage in crooked thinking and going from failing at something to invalidly concluding and defining yourself as a failure. That will only undermine the moments you experience happiness.
What you have read is not a perfect prescription for happiness. I reserve the right to change it as I evolve as a person and experiment with life. Allow me to leave you with one final thought on disturbance and happiness. Humans can easily demand perfection in themselves, others, and in life. Perfection is an ideal that does not have a real-world referent. People who demand perfection will have many sad moments and may make themselves miserable. People who try to perfect themselves or others will create misery. No one can have a perfectly happy life. However, if you use REBT daily, learn to develop unconditional self-acceptance and unconditional life-acceptance, and then take calculated risks and experiment, you will likely have many happy moments on this journey called life. Enjoy the process of actively moving towards more happy moments and joyful moments. Let REBT philosophy be your guide.