Never, ever forget it
Pretty much every time I have been chronically unhappy, it was because I was convinced somebody else was “making” me that way. Because once you give up control over your own happiness, you’re just blowing with the wind, influenced by other people’s actions and moods.
Plus, you can start to stubbornly cling to your anger and resentment about the way others are “making” you miserable, until you get to the point where you almost want everyone around you to act like jerks, just so you can be right about what jerks they really are.
The surest predictor of happiness, for me, is not to let other people’s actions knock me off course. Of course I sometimes get upset or angry or sad when dealing with other people–that’s just human. But I can’t give them either the credit or the blame for my essential happiness–it’s not fair, and it’s not really accurate. In the end, it’s all up to me, baby.
Filed under: Life
In Harry Browne’s “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World,” there is a good explanation of how allowing oneself to become depend on other people changing what they do in order to achieve one’s own happiness is a recipe for a life of frustration and misery.
This is why he suggested that happy people were those who avoided political campaigns to make the world a better place. It makes more sense to find happiness in the things one can have control over.
In this sense, sometimes it isn’t “someone else” making me unhappy, it’s the expectation that other people should do what I want them to and reality not reaching this, that is the problem.