Where is happiness, exactly? Try to point at it. It is not up at the high moments and it is not the thing you are chasing. It sits on the ordinary line in the middle.
Where is happiness, exactly? Try to point at it. It is not up at the high moments and it is not the thing you are chasing. It sits on the ordinary line in the middle.
The peaks give you endorphins and you cannot stay there. The millionaire wants two million and the billionaire wants two billion, because we keep thinking the next level up is where it lives. It is not a place you get to. Pay attention to the mundane line instead, the normal one, because that is where you actually are happy.
One thing to try: Take one breath and listen to what is around you. That is the centre line, and you are already on it.
In this episode
(0:00) Point at happiness. Where is it right now?
(2:50) Likes, and what we started wanting instead
(4:27) The centre line, and what we might call the mundane
(6:30) The pleasures, the endorphins, and why we cannot stay there
(9:06) Why the normal line is where the happiness actually is
(11:14) You cannot pinpoint it. It is not somewhere to get to
(13:09) The millionaire who wants two million
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Where is happiness, exactly?
Try to point at it. You cannot, because it is not a place and it is not out there waiting. It is the line running through the middle of your ordinary day.
The heart of it
Happiness is the absence of longing for pleasure and the absence of pushing away pain.
The highs are pleasures. Real, worth having, and not the thing itself.
If you are not happy with what you have, more of it will not fix that.
Draw a line across a piece of paper. That is normal. Not excited, not miserable. Doing the dishes, hoovering, picking the children up.
Above it is everything good. A holiday, a promotion, a concert, being close to somebody. Below it is everything you would rather not have. The diagnosis, the bills, the loneliness.
Almost everybody assumes happiness lives above the line. It does not. It is the line.
Here is how you know. Ask anybody who has had something go badly wrong what they want, and they will tell you they just want to get home and do the dishes. That is the whole argument in one sentence.
The highs produce endorphins and endorphins have one rule. Too many and you need more. Which is why you cannot stay in the honeymoon period, and why the millionaire wants two million and the billionaire wants two billion. Every level up becomes the new normal within weeks and then it is boring.
We take shortcuts to get there. That is the trip to the fridge.
And the same applies downwards, which is the part worth watching. Spend long enough below the line and that becomes your normal, and then merely paying your bills registers as happiness.
One small thing to try
Find your ordinary line and pay attention to it.
The car starting. The bills covered, whether or not there is anything left. This breath. The birds outside. Somebody on the phone.
Enjoy the highs thoroughly when they come. Just do not decide you need them, because needing them is what puts you back under the line the moment they end.
Questions people ask
Is this telling me to lower my expectations?
No. It is telling you that you are already standing in the thing you are looking for and have been walking past it. Aim as high as you like. Just stop treating the ordinary day as the waiting room.
What about genuinely bad times?
Those are real and this does nothing to shorten them. Knowing the line exists is what tells you where you are heading back to, and the ordinary day is a far better target than a permanent high.
Why can I not stay happy after something good happens?
Because it becomes the new normal, quickly. That is not a fault in you, it is how the chemistry works, and knowing it stops you chasing the next one quite so hard.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
happiness · joy · acceptance
Read the transcript
Okay.
Where is happiness?
Try to pinpoint where happiness is right now.
I'll just give you a few seconds.
It's quite a simple question to ponder upon, and it's something
I've been thinking about recently.
So where is happiness?
It's not so easy to locate, is it?
It's not a place, it's not an object, it's not somewhere out there.
It's not a place you need to get to.
It's a feeling.
It's a feeling.
Right?
So what is happiness?
Let's answer that question on today's podcast.
I'm Stephen Webb and this is Living Deeper Lives and also Stillness
in the Storms podcast.
And this podcast is for you.
If you have an active mind and you have a busy life and you don't
have time to sit and meditate for hours every day, but you still
want a little inner peace.
So happiness, what is it?
Where is it?
How do we get it?
We all want it.
As children, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Well, I want to be this, I want to be that, because we think
it's going to make us happy.
And as parents, whenever you ask a parent what you want your kid
to be when they're older, they might say a doctor or something like
that.
But above all, they always come back and say, I would like my
child to be happy.
And I think that's what we want for our partner, our children,
our parents, everybody.
We want them to be happy.
But what is happy?
What does happy mean?
What does it mean to be happy?
If I asked you when you're happy, so why are you happy?
You're very often might mention something on the outside
world, well, I've just got a job promotion or I've just got a
pay rise, or I just passed an exam, got a new car, just started
a new relationship or something, or just got out of a relationship,
perhaps more than likely mention something externally, you
won't look up and say, I just feel happy.
And then if you say to other people, well, what will make you
happy right now?
What will improve your circumstances right now?
They say, well, if I had a bit more money, if I was a bit healthier,
if I lost a bit of weight, if I gained a bit of weight, if I had
a bit better tan or nowadays lipo suction, lipo fillers or fake
eyebrows or whatever, I don't know what.
I'm not really up on the modern stuff, but a few more likes
on Facebook, A few more like I remember on Facebook, it always used
to be likes to it you put up a picture, how many likes will I get?
And now it's like not interested in likes.
I want the love and I want the funny and I want all the other things.
You know, the likes are not that interesting.
And this is really funny.
And I talk about the happiness line.
And if you imagine a piece of paper, draw a line right in the middle
of the piece of paper.
And then if I say to you, that line is your center line, that's
the line when you feel normal.
You're not excited, you're not in intimate moments, you're not cuddling
anyone, you're not feeling any kind of excitement or enlightenment
or spiritual bliss or any of those things.
And below that line is everything that going to the doctors,
find that you're ill or cannot pay your debts, or you're feeling
lonely or you're feeling depressed or anything like that is
below the line.
And depending on whether how far up or down on the scale, above
and below the line you go, you know, if you're going on holiday,
you're quite high up above the line.
If you're in bed and having an intimate moment, you're having sex
with somebody, you're quite well up above the line.
And then the moment you climax, you're like top of the paper,
off the paper, off the scale.
But then when you go to the doctors and you suddenly get diagnosed
with something that isn't that good, or you hear someone has, and
suddenly you're down below the paper.
But I want to come back and focus on the centre line.
I want to come back and focus on the center line.
When are you at that centre line?
We might call this the mundane line.
When we're doing the dishes or when we're doing the hoovering or
picking the kids up from school or meditating.
The thing is, that centre line is what I believe is where all the
happiness is.
Happiness is not having the things below and not having the things
above.
It's the absence of problems and the absence of pleasures.
That's where your happiness lies.
And if you take away everything, all the pleasures above
and you take away all the things you do not want from below,
the anti pleasures, whatever you want to call them, the down bits,
the things that make you feel awful.
If you take away all of them things, what you have, you have right
now, you have this current moment, you have this breath, you
have a feeling of normalcy, normalcy, normalness.
You have a feeling of normalness right at this moment.
But the problem is everybody thinks happiness is above the line.
Everybody Thinks happiness is in the pleasures, and it's not.
Happiness is not sitting in the concert listening to the most
impressive tune.
That's just the energy of the concert and listening to your favorite
music.
And that's.
That's the pleasures.
That's the great things in life.
Happiness is not those things.
Happiness is not the new relationship when you're in the honeymoon.
Happiness is not the cuddling in bed, the getting the new car,
the new house, the pay rise.
They're the pleasures in life.
They're the things that are like, yay, I want them.
They're good, let them come.
But we cannot stay there.
They produce endorphins.
And the problem is with endorphins, you have too many of
them, you want more of them.
And we spend our life trying to trick our bodies and the world
into just giving us endorphins, these artificial highs.
And we think we take shortcuts, and that's why we have
chocolate, and that's why we go to the fridge and things like
that.
At any given moment, most people are, when they're on the normal
line, they want to improve it because they think the normal line
is boring.
What's the point of being on the normal line?
I don't want to be here.
I want to be in the realms of everything that's cool and theme
park utopia kind of world.
Well, the problem is that would become your new normal and
therefore you wouldn't enjoy it.
And you want even more.
You want to know what the secret of happiness is?
Realizing that happiness is in the mundane.
Happiness is in the mundane right here, right now.
Listening to this podcast, you.
You haven't got why you're listening to my words while you're
listening to what I'm saying, why your subconscious mind is like,
he might have a point, or, nah, he's full of it.
Whatever.
Whatever your subconscious mind is conjuring up to trick you
into whatever next, same as mine.
You've got the absence of all the pleasures and you've got the
absence of all the pains.
And while you've got the absence of the pleasures and the
absence of the pains, that's happiness.
That's happiness.
It's not all the great things.
See, we can easily see the pains that aren't happy, that aren't
the mundane.
They're the pains.
We recognize that.
And the problem is, if we feel depressed quite a lot and we feel
lonely quite a lot, we'll think that that line is our center
of compass and it'll become the normal.
And then when you're feeling that way, when you're just able to
pay the bills, you'll see that as happiness.
So we need to pay more attention to where this centre line
is, where this mundane, what you might call it, the normalness
line, because that's where you're happy.
When the car starts in the morning and you drive out your drive,
when you can pay your bills, whether or not you got money left
over doesn't matter.
But when you can pay your bills, when you just sat there and
take a deep breath and have a little time out, that's happiness.
Happiness is the absence of longing for anything pleasurable
and the absence of pushing, pushing away anything that's painful
and that's worth repeating because I really want you to get
this concept.
Happiness is the absence of longing for pleasure.
It's also the absence of pushing away anything that causes
pain.
Happiness is in that deep breath right now.
Don't think it's in the concert or in the alcohol or perhaps
in the drugs.
All of those are highs.
All of those are the endorphins.
And guess what happens when we have too many endorphins?
We cannot function.
That's why we cannot stay in the honeymoon period for too long.
That's why men leave the Lucy up.
To stop those endorphins coming along too fast and to make
sure after three weeks or so that.
That the partner sees that we are dumbasses and we're pain in the
ass in the relationship, too.
It's to reduce those endorphins.
So we're actually doing you a favor.
I'm joking.
I'm going to get in so much trouble for this.
I'm joking.
We're just stupid men.
We do stupid things.
We're not stupid.
Okay, I stand corrected.
But happiness is in the mundane.
It really is.
You cannot pinpoint it.
It's not a place to get to.
It's right here, right now.
You have it right here, right now.
Just take a deep breath.
Listen to the bells of the local church.
Hear the wind, listen to the birds singing.
Recognize that you're alive and you're well in this moment.
Because this moment will change.
Always will.
And if you're listening to this podcast, you're doing all right.
You're really doing okay.
So right now, find your level of mundane, what you class in your
life as mundane.
Because the problem is, if things suddenly go wrong in your
mundane, you so want to just get back.
Do you know what?
I can talk to so many people that say, I just want to get home
and do the dishes.
Just do the hoovering, just do the vacuuming, I think you call it
in the States, don't you?
Just go home and do the vacuum and the brushing up.
Because something's gone wrong in their lives and they just want
to get back to the mundane, the happiness.
And then when you're above a line, you just fear, oh, I want this
to stay.
I want this to stay forever.
Will you hug me forever, please?
Never let me go.
Oh, I just want all these things, you know, like everything,
like every single thing above the line.
If you think it's the new norm, you want to up the ante every
single time, you know, intimacy in relationships, you up
the ante every single time until you cannot up it anymore.
Money, you think, well, I'll be okay with $10,000, $20,000.
And then when you have that, you want 50 and then 100.
Then the millionaire wants 202 million, and the billionaire wants
2 billion.
It's because we think we get.
We go to that level higher and we become happy.
And then we need to stay there.
But that's not where the happiness.
They're the highs, they're the pleasures.
Enjoy the pleasures when they're there.
Enjoy the pleasures when they're there.
Know that they're only temporary and you don't need to keep
hold of them to stay happy.
And equally with the pains, recognize that they're temporary
and they won't stay there forever.
I hope this helps.
I hope you look at happiness in a different way and reframe it.
And it means you can enjoy the hide in life a whole lot more.
You can really look forward to them, but don't think you need them
to be happy, because you don't.
If you're happy now with what you have, you'll be happy with what
you get.
If you're not happy now with what you have, you won't be happy
when you get more.
Because you will always want more.
You're already happy right now.
You just got to realize it, that's all.
So I go back to the very first question.
Where is happiness?
Right here, right now.
Happiness is in the mundane.
The running, the kids to get to school, the walking the dog, paying
the bills, talking to your mum on the phone, cooking tea for your
partner, eating tea.
All those other things, they're all.
They're all the mundane, the chores.
That's where the happiness is.
Because at some point, that's all you want to do when you cannot
do it.
Take care.
Have an amazing week.
There's a new podcast every Monday and remember I help people
with active minds and busy lives have a little inner peace.
And you can head over to stillness in the storms.com where
you can download my meditations.
You can also treat me to a coffee if I help you.
Take care everyone.
Thank you for the reviews.
You are awesome.
Thank you for spending this little bit of time with me today.
