Welcome to The Happiness Portfolio, and thanks for taking the time to categorize your different sources of happiness. I appreciate your willingness to give this a shot, especially since it’s taken a month for your author to get to the actual “Happiness Portfolio”.
But wait no more! I hope these insights about overreliance on the sources of happiness prove as meaningful for you as they did for me.
Prompt: How much do I rely on one area of my life for happiness?
Perspective
As mentioned last time, I relied heavily on one source of happiness, food, to solve my moment-to-moment desire for satisfaction. There’s a Mexican saying about mezcal that’s applicable here:
Para todo mal, mezcal.
Para todo bein, también.
While this may be a recipe for happiness for mezcaleros1, it doesn’t work so well for the rest of us. In economic terms, I was over-indexing my happiness portfolio in one sector instead of diversifying across multiple. One of the main issues with overreliance on any one area for happiness is that it can lead you to feel overall less happy, despite the many wonderful things in your daily life. One question that helped clarify this for me was “what am I looking forward to?”
What am I looking forward to?
My honest answers were almost totally focused on career aspirations, and I didn’t put much thought into the other areas. Being fully bought in on the idea of joy through work, I was increasingly frustrated by what I felt was a lack of forward progress.
To put that in our model, because I was over-indexed on one particular source of present happiness, my love of food, and I was trying to accommodate for an overreliance on another area for future happiness, my career, I gained weight and wasn’t able to enjoy some of the other present and future sources of happiness.
A one-legged stool is a shitty stool, and overreliance on one source of present or future happiness is a recipe for a rough ride, especially after a few Oaxacan old fashioneds.
Practice
Now that you have your happiness portfolio in front of you spend five to ten minutes over the next two weeks thinking about how these sources of happiness are distributed.
Consider the following questions:
Are certain buckets larger than others? If they’re relatively equal-sized, do you spend more time in one area?
Are the buckets the same when you think about present happiness (what makes me happy?) and future happiness (what am I looking forward to?)
Are there areas with few sources of happiness or that you spend little time focused on?
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to continue this conversation, I’ll see you in two weeks when we’ll take on one of the most common myths about happiness.
Until then, be well, and if you know of any mezcal cocktails that I need to try reply to this email or leave a comment below.
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To learn more about mezcal, I’d recommend traveling to Oaxaca, going to a bar without English menus, and asking around. Short of that, read Emma Janzen’s excellent book.