How to be happy even though the world sucks

You deserve to experience every wonderful feeling your body is capable of

Sep 09, 2023

This is a gentle rant about the importance of joy, with some useful tips about meeting your needs. And there’s some more advanced stuff at the end about rewriting your beliefs and rewiring your brain for joy. 🧠

Hi everyone,

I’m a bit fired up today and I’m going to just roll with it.

Let’s just first start out on the same page:

First. If you’re like me, you find living on this planet to be extremely difficult. We’re just going to take that as a given.
Second. None of the things I’m talking about in this post are easy. I’m not trying to say that being consistently happy as a sensitive person in a world that is burning is easy. All I’m saying is that it’s do-able.

This post is about believing in joy and happiness for yourself, and valuing it so highly that you prioritize it.

It’s about letting go of cynicism, if it isn’t serving you.

It’s about challenging habitual unhappiness, and deliberately cultivating happiness, joy, and good feelings.

I get the backlash against “toxic positivity”, but positivity is not toxic. What is toxic is suppressing negative feelings that tell us about legitimate needs.1 But part of what those feelings are saying is that we need joy in our lives.

It’s entirely possible to build your life around things that light you up, that make you feel alive, that feed your soul, that make you want to leap out of bed in the morning. You deserve to live like this. We all do.

The reason I called my blog Joy Ninja way back when I started writing (in my 20s, gah) is that I recognized that joy was a tricky beast. I was depressed, overwhelmed, and had no idea why life was so hard for me. It would take me almost two decades to figure that out, but I knew, even back then, that joy was not something I was willing to compromise on. I wanted to feel it ALL—all the gnarly stuff inside me—to heal it—so I could expand my access to all the good stuff inside me too.

I now am figuring out that I have even more sensitivities and particular needs for support than I thought (due to ADHD/neurodivergence). And you know what I’ve done with that information? Immediately started working on systematically implementing what I need.2

Because if there is one thing I’ve gotten clear on in the last 20 years of working on myself, it’s this: sustainable happiness rests on a foundation of consistently meeting your needs.

There are other tools I think are super important too, like using mental processes to rewrite negative beliefs, and state shifting, which is the art of practicing being happy anyway. (More on that later in this post.)

But if your needs are not met, you’re going to be stressed out and unable to do these things. So that’s where it has to start.

Your needs matter. Meeting your needs is not optional. Joy and happiness is a natural byproduct of meeting your needs. That’s what negative and positive emotions are for. They aren’t random—they are giving us information to steer us in the right direction.

Here is what I like to keep in mind about needs:

I can only meet my needs in the present.
I can only meet the needs of who I actually am, not an imaginary person I wish I was.
As I meet my needs right now, I’m making it easier to do so again in the future, because I’m practicing how to meet my needs and thus laying down brain pathways that become habits.
I don’t have to meet my needs 100% right now, and I probably can’t because I don’t know how. The thing to do is to find the smallest doable-right-now thing that gets me moving in the right direction.
If that’s too hard, build an onramp to it. If that’s too hard, make the ramp less steep. Also, add cute things to the ramp, because things that are fun to do are easier to do.
Thinking about how a need could be met is moving in the right direction, and it’s entirely OK and great to start there.
It’s OK if I don’t know how to meet a need. I can research it slowly and ask my friends how they do it. There is no rush.
There is also no shortcut. Putting pressure on myself does not meet any needs, and it makes it harder to meet my needs.
There will be days that I can’t do the things I have previously learned and put and place, and that’s OK. Growth and learning and building habits are non-linear processes. I just have to keep going in the right direction and not be hard on myself. (Being hard on myself doesn’t meet any needs, and it just generates more needs, so it’s really not efficient!)
Brains take time to rewire and we don’t notice as it’s happening so it’s good to look back once in a while.
No matter what, I can always love myself. And loving myself (i.e. viewing myself with unconditional positive regard) gives me energy and motivation to meet my needs, so it’s a win-win!
Surrounding myself with people who believe needs are important and prioritize meeting their needs supports me to meet my own needs.
The more different strategies I have to meet a need, the more abundant and stable I will feel around that need.

Again, the most important thing: you can start to meet your needs in the smallest way possible and that is 1000% times better than not starting at all. It gets the ball rolling.

Here is an example of me putting this into practice.

Need: To improve my health by eating more vegetables.

Here’s what makes that hard:

I don’t know how to easily and consistently make vegetables taste good and be the right level of cooked.
Fresh vegetables go bad.
They also require prep work, like washing and chopping.

In the past I would:

Think, I ought to know how to do this and it ought to be easy.
Buy aspirational vegetables, especially ones I thought I should like, but actually don’t like, like zucchini. (see #2 above - trying to meet the needs of an imaginary person!)
A few weeks later, throw out my rotten aspirational vegetables.
Feel bad.

To meet my real needs instead, I’m doing this:

Buying frozen vegetables. They don’t require prep work, and I can experiment without time pressure.
Buying vegetables I already like.
Expecting to spend a long time working up to cooking them.
Expecting to spend some time researching different simple, easy ways to prepare frozen veggies that look do-able and like they would taste good.
Not worrying about it if they turn out bad, because it’s an experiment.

Right now, they are just sitting in my freezer as an option to explore when I feel like it. Because that is the degree of no-pressure I need to have around it. So that’s what I’m giving myself: exactly what I need to be able to keep moving in the right direction.

Also, I just found a tip on a FB group for Low Executive Function foods (#12 above—find support by seeking out other people meeting their needs)—that those baby food pouches of mashed up veggies can be a good option, so I’m gonna try those too. (#13 - abundant strategies)

OK, now let’s talk about the more advanced steps, which are about rewriting your beliefs and rewiring your brain.

Here’s how I think about beliefs: beliefs are just thoughts we continue to think. They are mental habits. (Thinking of them this way also makes it easier to change them.)

You can change your thoughts, so you can change your beliefs. This is best done slowly, by just trying on the idea that maybe something else is true than what you thought. Just think about these as ideas.

Don’t try to force yourself to believe anything new. That doesn’t work and it creates internal resistance. Just try new beliefs on, and see how you feel. Then maybe write them on a post-it and see how it feels to look at it.

You didn’t come to believe your current beliefs overnight. Any kind of change is a process best done slowly and gently. So when I present these ideas, I’m not saying you should believe this now. I’m saying, here are some ideas I found helpful, and you might too, but maybe not, it’s up to you.

I say that because it’s true but also because resistance is real and it’s far better to prevent it by being gentle and inclusive to your inner parts in the first place than to go too fast and trigger their defenses.

Talk to your inner parts about what objections they have to an idea, and see if the objections are really true or if they represent fears and needs. It’s much easier to change if you first get buy-in from all your inner parts. And you only get that by having real-talk conversations with them where you clearly convey that their needs and feelings and perspective matters.

OK, enough preamble. Let’s talk about the beliefs!

I feel very strongly that the worst beliefs we can have are things that separate us from our own natural and abundant joy for life—the kind you see in children, before the world grinds it out of them. So if I get a little intense about this, please attribute it to how fucking transformational this was for me, and how much I want this for you, and everyone.

The two biggest beliefs I have ditched in the process of becoming sustainably happy are:

1. Happiness isn’t real. Happy people are fake.

No. People faking happiness are fake. Real happiness is fucking awesome.

Think back to moments where you were genuinely happy. Was it fake?

I get sometimes our brain rewrites the past if it feels like something was taken away from us. There’s a way we protect ourselves from good things if it feels too vulnerable or risky to be happy.

But the happiness we want is still real. And it matters. It’s worth doing whatever healing and work we need to do to get there.

Being unhappy isn’t more “real” or “authentic”. Authenticity and happiness are independent qualities.

2. The world sucks, so I can’t be happy.

Believe me, I get it. The world majorly sucks. But happiness is actually an independent variable. It takes work but you can detach your inner state from outer circumstances.

Note: I’m not talking about outer circumstances that you are living with on a daily basis. That goes in the category above about needs. I’m talking here about the general terribleness of things you can’t control, like other people and what they are doing with their money and power.

I’m talking about things like politics and climate change, that affect us whether we like it or not, but we don’t have to be constantly worked up about, because that won’t change anything anyway.

Look, we may be on a doomed planet, in a society that will never un-fuck itself. That’s the reality. There are horrible atrocities happening every second of every day in this world. Oppression is a daily fact of existence.

But you can still be happy anyway.

I know, I probably sound like a crazy person right now. 😂 The idea that our happiness does not have to be based on our external circumstances is just not something that is commonly believed.

But I didn’t get to real happiness and joy by denying the world sucks. I got there by accepting that humans are pretty horrible to each other on a regular basis,3 and I can still have an internal boundary and protect my peace.

I made my happiness unconditional. I stopped believing that anything external to me had to be in place before I could be happy.

In other words, I internalized that:

I don’t have to be OK with the world to be OK with myself.
I don’t have to fix myself or my life to love myself and meet my needs.
The world doesn’t have to change for me to be happy in it.
Any idea that happiness is out there in the future, or contained in some goal I have yet to accomplish, is not true and is just preventing me from being happy now.

Which brings us to the mastery level of unconditional happiness: state shifting.

OK, so what the heck is “state shifting”?

State shifting is a technique of mentally training yourself to "be happy anyway", i.e. self-generate states of joy and happiness, which eventually will reset your baseline emotional state by rewiring your brain to be habitually happy.

I talk about the nitty gritty of state shifting on my blog: introdution to state-shifting and how it differs from toxic positivity.

It took me a few months of practicing this regularly to change my emotional set point to one where I experience spontaneous intense joy on a regular basis, and my overall level of happiness is quite high. Even though my external life isn’t any better, and I haven’t achieved any major life goals. That’s the point: it’s about not needing to change your life or accomplish anything to be happy. It’s about being happy now, for no reason.

I’m still working on changing my life and accomplishing my goals. I just am not willing to wait on that to be happy. Especially since the world is getting increasingly fragile, and goals are harder to accomplish. Happiness is not something I want to be conditional on external events, because I can’t control the external world, and it’s increasingly unstable.

Final thoughts

Look, I know I can’t really convey everything about how to accomplish this in one newsletter, because it took me many years of personal and spiritual growth, as well as several significant ego deaths, to get here. Becoming full of joy despite how sensitive I am and how difficult it is for me to deal with life on this planet has been in many ways my life’s work.

So all I’m really going to be able to convey to you is that (a) it is possible and (b) it is worth it. And give you a few pointers.

What I want to leave you with is this:

Your naturally joyful self is vibrant and alive and worth getting to know. And it can only come out when you support yourself well enough to not be in survival mode, and take your happiness seriously enough to value it highly, nurture it, and protect it.

This world is too fucking crushing to take for granted that happiness will just appear one day. And the narratives of capitalism, that you’ll be happy one day, after you work yourself to death, are fucking absurd. But real, sustained, ebullient, overflowing joy is possible to cultivate inside yourself. In an existence where we have very little control over the world around us, the fact that we can rewire our brain is fucking amazing. 💚