Finding Happiness

This week we answer a listener's question on happiness.  The topic of happiness is not an easy one and one that often goes to the core of who we are and how we see the world around us.  Tune in and check it out!

Transcript

Intro: 0:01

Globally, one in every eight people suffer from a mental disorder, anxiety and depression affect people from all walks of life, all ages, all ethnicities, and we're here to talk about it. This is a quiet chaos podcast, from anxiety to depression, from disorders to marriage, and everything in between we're talking about we're talking about it. Oh, really raw, and we'll have some fun. Let's do it. This is the quiet chaos podcast. And now your host, author, therapist, international speaker, Jason and our solo women.

Jason Sullivan: 0:49

Welcome to the quiet chaos podcast. This is your host, Jason Sullivan. And it is a pleasure to be back. It is December 18. And this year has just gone so quickly. I feel like I say that every weekend. Maybe I do. But I am just blown away at how fast this year has gone. We are one week out from Christmas. I'd love another week out from New Year. So I don't know if you guys are making your resolutions. The only resolution I make is that I have resolved not to make resolutions. And that's mainly because mine usually fail in the first seven days if that. They're more like New Year's ideas. It hadn't. So I resolved to go to the gym. That sounds great until I arrive at the gym. And I realized, well, this is probably why I haven't been the rest of the year. And so. So my resolution is to try to be consistent, tried to update my resolutions through the year. And to not do it all in one go and just say I want to be in the shape and I want to be this or that or the other. I think that our resolve is much longer, should be more consistent and more thorough, and probably a lot more specific. I know that weight loss is a big one. And I also would like to have that as a resolution. But that takes 364 Other days of discipline. And that's the difficult part, isn't it? Well, this week, we have a request from Justin in Salt Lake City, Utah. It says Dear Jason, I have anxiety and depression. You said in one of the episodes that people with anxiety have a low outlook on life in the future. And that it was a symptom. I want to be happy. I want to wake up in the morning and feel like I'm okay and not just making it through another day. I guess I just want to feel hope can you help? Well, Justin, I'm gonna try my best. And we're gonna flip this term happiness on its head a little bit, dissect it, put it back together and try to make it a little more attainable. So let's start off happiness kind of has more than one connotation. It's not just one thing. I'm happy that someone won a match or a basketball game coming from Orlando. I'm a big magic fan. We don't celebrate as many wins as I would like, but I am happy when they win. And this is more like a short term happiness. It comes about by a bit of surprise, or it comes back out as a short term victory. Something that is a bit passive. Then you look at medium term. It's kind of a subjective view on our life, like the satisfaction about what's going on in us how well we appreciate our life as a whole route. Veenhoven really did studies about this, and finds and found out that it actually differs across cultures. And this is that was her definition and overall appreciation of one's life as a whole. And so this moves into a bit bigger category, when now when you're starting to weigh out your life, weigh out the the days, not just a day or an event, but the days that turned into months. It turned into years. I was thinking about this the other day that we're really concerned about where we're going in life. What I'm going to be how I want to be I don't want to end up a certain way. And I do fall prey to that quite a bit. I think ahead and I'm like I want to be this kind of person. I want to be genuine I want to be authentic. I want to have good integrity and Those are great goals. And I think we should always be striving for new goals. But I find that most of those ideas are tied to future. And it kind of occurred to me that very rarely do I assess, not what I'm going to become but who I am. Am I Am I an honest person? Do I have integrity? Am I a better person now than I was last week or last year or even yesterday. And taking that assessment is the is the tough part. Now, Justin, when when you were saying that the the outlook on life was low with anxiety, that's true, we do tend to have a low optimistic bias. And what that means is that we tend to be a little more doubtful about the future about what's coming up about hope, long term or down the road. It doesn't mean we can't be happy, though. And the short term happiness, of course, is much easier. It's much more easily attained. It can come through little things, like I said, it can come through a promotion, or it can come from a vacation, looking forward to a break or a holiday. These are also ways that we feel that short term happiness, the medium term, I think, this is the tough one. Overall appreciation of one's life. I mean, that's, that's a difficult bar to raise ourselves to, especially, especially when we're anxious and depressed. I mean, we will sit and worry and worry and worry about everything that's ever happened, how we're dealing with it, are we competent to deal with it, we do tend to carry a bit of imposter syndrome with this. And I think that's not just towards people who have anxiety. But I think that in general, and most people have some sense of impostor syndrome, we don't want to be seen as weak or exposed and wanting more, we want to be seen as successful. If you, if you read CVS or resumes from people, generally they'll they'll give you the bigger picture or a bit of an exaggerated idea of who they are. I spent a long time hiring and reviewing CVS and and I think it's true that we do tend to over estimate ourselves on paper. But internally, I think it's much more common that we end to underestimate ourselves. And frankly, that's a bit easier to underestimate ourselves. Because you really can't disappoint yourself if you really don't see a lot of potential or a lot of hope. And you find that we tend to settle for not going towards disappointment, as opposed to aiming for success and striving. Because if I put 100% into something and I fail, well, that really does put a limitation on how I can see myself. I think that happiness in the midterm sense, is a bit counterintuitive, as most things are that are worth working through. And that's counterintuitive because we don't know how to succeed simply because we haven't gotten used to failure. And that sounds a bit bleak, maybe. But I found it to be true over the years. When I strive and I set out to do something and fail. And I fail again and I fail again and I fail again. It's amazing how failure loses its power, and how it loses its ability to intimidate me. And that frees me up to take more risks. It frees me up to pursue the thing that I want to accomplish with freedom with a bit more confidence with a bit more ease. When I was published in 2020. Submitting book proposals was the ultimate test in futility it it was not a happy time. If you look into the guidelines and the ideas of submitting, getting picked up by a publisher is is very difficult. The percentages are very low. And when you read feedback from other authors, what they tell you is this, the goal each month is to be rejected at least 160 times so that means that you would receive 40 rejections a week. And if you've ever looked at a book proposal, each publisher requires a bit different format and so you're putting quite a bit Time into arranging, rearranging, adding information, taking out information, and just constantly formatting formatting, it is discouraging. Because week after week after week, your goal is not necessarily to succeed, it's to receive the rejections. In other words, prepare to fail. And if that's not discouraging enough, I don't really know what is. The pleasant note was that even though you fail 160 times a month, you only need one acceptance letter. And then you hope that that acceptance letter isn't followed by a scam or other nonsense that tends to come with these contracts. But you do the same. And what I found is that in a pretty short period of time, it was a bit of a game, just like what I had read in different writing groups, there was a bit of enjoyment, you started looking at how creative the rejection letters would become. And it was kind of fun, because you'd find that either, they would be just very bland and very, just very vague, like, well, we're not looking at authors in this genre at this time to we're very, very sorry, and a very heartfelt rejection. But nonetheless, it's still a rejection at the end of the day. And then even the worse, were the ones that just didn't reply. And that happens quite a bit. And so you just keep moving on. Establishing establishing happiness, in times like that, really does come with normalizing the idea that I can fail. Failure is not doom and gloom, failure, it means you're alive, it means you're trying it means you're making effort. It's not a judgment of who you are. It's more of a commentary, that you've chosen the path and that you're choosing to move forward on that path. And every step of the way, is a fight. And in life, all good things worth having it tend to be a fight. And so when you're looking at Hope, when you're looking at happiness, happiness is going to vary, hope is going to vary. But what are you drawing from what is the baseline that you're drawing from when you define hope? And so foundational ideas, your presuppositions of what happiness means your expectations of what hope should look like, whether it's short term, midterm or long term. And that's the difficult part. And when we talk about anxiety and depression, one of the more key areas is that medium term happiness, that overall sense of appreciation. Now, when I say appreciation, I want to really be careful here. Because I do think when we start talking about happiness, and hope, which are absolutely wonderful things, I think that we tend to wrap our ideas around guilt, and very, very quickly, happiness becomes a guilt driven idea when we are being encouraged. I hear terms all the time that include the word should, I should be happy, I have no reason to be sad, feel ungrateful and, and I should just be satisfied, I shouldn't be full of hope. And other people have it worse. Why should I feel hopeless? Why should I not be happy? I just, I just don't appreciate the things that I have. And, and I think that's a cop out when people give you advice like that, that you should be happy, you should just appreciate the things you have. And again, other people have it worse, well, maybe, maybe maybe other people have it worse, maybe other people have a better, but that really doesn't have much bearing on you as a person, your sense of happiness, your sense of who you are your identity. All of these things are tied together. And so establishing happiness apart from being guilted into viewing other people's lesser circumstances or greater circumstances, which really ultimately leads to a sense of guilt. I think we need to look at it a different direction. Because guilt itself is a judgment. Guilt is saying I already did something wrong. And in reality, we will do things that are wrong. We will fail at many of the endeavors that we set out to do. If you go back to the 1960s and you look at the Kennedy administration and what was going on during the Cold War, the administration had chosen to race ahead as fast as it could against the Soviet Union. And during that time, JFK in 1962, gave a famous speech, one of his best speeches in my personal opinion, to Rice University. And he says, We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept. one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. Now, out of all of the Apollo missions, the first one, Apollo one didn't even leave the ground. In 1967, during a test, there was a fire in the cabin, the entire crew was lost. From the beginning, there was failure by Apollo 11, we hear the words from Neil Armstrong as he landed on the moon. This is one small step for man, and one great leap for mankind. This wasn't the last of the missions. And it wasn't the last of the failures. Apollo 13 had to abort the mission. On their way to the moon, they circled the moon, they made it back safely. But again, explosion had an impact on the mission. When we look back, and we think of the technology that existed in the 1960s, they were able to achieve things that we are just starting to rediscover. They didn't have the technology that we have now they didn't have the abilities that we have. Now, in many senses, the failures and successes of those times laid the groundwork for what we do and the abilities that we have to move forward. And yet, we're still rediscovering. When was the last time that you set out to do something that maybe maybe and we'll go back to resolutions, when was the last time you you made some type of resolution to achieve a task, you set out and you failed. And in failing, maybe you went to shame and you felt like I'm a failure, I can't do this i i should have tried harder, or I just don't care anymore. And at that point, we we shift from guilt to shame. Guilt, telling me, I did it wrong shame telling me I am wrong. The verdict of an action versus the verdict of a person. See, happiness is lost. In the transition from guilt to shame. We see ourselves as the problem. We don't see our sense of hope in that process. Being comfortable with failure paves the way to success and ultimately, happiness. Accepting that we are not enough to accomplish everything gives us perspective that there's always room to grow, there's always room to move forward. It sets the stage for the next set of actions that lets us hone in on the next mission of our lives. One of the things that I always find fascinating is that in the world of physics and quantum physics, you're always at the edge of knowledge, you're always at the edge of what has been known and what is to be known. Quantum physics posters that pass the limits it's it's a peek into the things beyond a veil beyond the the world that we experience on a daily basis and yet what is the foundation of the world we experience? And when you begin to shift that perspective, you see a grander scale, you see a place where science becomes a playground. And the joy of learning is ignited by things that honestly don't make sense in our perspective of reality today, when you think of muons nuans, quarks, when you think of time space, when you think of the limitations of our understanding and our senses and how slow Slowly, slowly, we begin to theorize what exists beyond what you find is the ability to play, the ability to run forward, the ability to experiment, the ability to strive in directions that we may not have answers for, and 100 200 300 years, but we begin to lay the foundations of what the next generations accomplish. That in our lifespan might be seen as failure on our part. But learning to stand at the edge of a precipice, the edge of a cliff, to stand in the front of the mystery, to be in awe, and to find peace. Because maybe the solution may be the goal is not to solve a problem. Maybe the goal is to become comfortable at the edge of understanding to learn to be content, knowing that we may not find answers, and that's, that's a tough call right there. When you look at the work of Albert Einstein, in his work on time, space and his theory of relativity, we're still trying to understand it. And yet, with all of our technology with all of our advancements, we're we're not there yet. We're just figuring out that he may be he was a little more right than we thought. We're just beginning to understand how time space works together, maybe a little more. But we're still not 100%. Convinced. did Einstein fail? No, not in everything, and not in a lot of things. Did he question themselves through the process, I would imagine. So he faced so much adversity over his lifetime. He was denied acceptance into college. He was told that he just wasn't smart enough to become a patent clerk. And while being a patent clerk, he drew these pictures, sketched it out, probably not the most efficient, probably not the most dedicated patent clerk that ever existed. But he drew these little pictures, these, these visuals. And it was in those times that he began to play around with the idea that time space was a continuum, that there was something outside of it something beyond something that even worked within it that we just don't get. He laid the foundations for most of the sciences for today. Now, did he have satisfaction? And as a patent clerk officer don't know. Absolutely don't know. But man, he went on to do some great things. Can you find peace? In the medium term? Can you find happiness in the midst of failure and continue? Can the idea that while learning and growing, rediscovering that we're not enough, is okay. Coming to peace with these things is valuable, it's necessary. In an undergrad, I was a philosophy Religious Studies major and I along with most of my classmates hovered over the fear of falling apart. It was a fun time, an amazing time. But the first thing we began to learn was that the answers you think you're going to find whether in the philosophies or in the sciences? You You're not going to find them? Not with clarity. Because philosophy is not aimed at answers. Philosophy is literally translated from attic Greek as the love of wisdom filo Sophia. It doesn't necessarily aim at the specifics. It aims at the the ability to be comfortable at the edge of the cliff of our understanding. And it does theorize, it does make a lot of claims and there are a lot of strange philosophies and a lot of brilliant philosophies that have undergirded our societies in ways that we still don't understand. And many of the philosophers and all of their achievements struggled with purpose. They struggled with happiness, and many of them were not happy. And this is true with the arts. Vincent van Gogh in his starry nights painting, we look at it and we see the brilliance of his art Do we see the brilliance of a new concept of painting a new style that had come about all because of one brilliant man. And yet, rarely do we understand that in the midst of that one painting was a man painting from the view of a window in an insane asylum, he was not okay. But we don't listen to those stories, we hover around the idea that we should just be appreciative, we should just be okay. And I'm not saying we shouldn't appreciate. I'm not saying that we shouldn't look back on the history of accomplishments and be grateful, of course. But I do think we should have perspective and recognize that the great achievements that we enjoy the fruit of today, were built on layers of failure. And the failure became the fuel that pushed people forward and continue to do so. Now, I want to address this long term concept of happiness. And this is, to me in some ways, I think it's a little more clear than that medium term. But it's not an easy one. See, if we go by Aristotle's idea of long term happiness, Aristotle's idea, his view was that long term happiness is built on the virtuous activity in accordance with reason. And maybe you like me, look at those words, and you think, well, there are some words, whatever that means. But we have to look a little deeper. What does virtuous mean? Does it mean perfect? Does it mean proper? Does it mean successful? No, not necessarily. Virtue, the quality of the heart moving forward? Are you moving according to your conscience? Is it the thing at the core of your efforts, that's telling you to take one more step to take one more risk. And I think this is where we get confused. Success is not always achievement. Success is pushing on the boundaries of what our conscious tells us is the next step. It's doing the difficult things, doing the hard things. Just as Kennedy said, because it's the best, it's the measure of the best of our energies and skills, because the challenge is one that we are willing to accept one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. And that's powerful. That's powerful. Because if the goal is to learn to risk freely, in one area of our life or another area of life, it doesn't mean that we're descending into unmitigated chaos. Rather, what it means is that we become an unstoppable force, one that is unhindered by guilt and shame. One that acts on virtue, one that functions on reason that moves us forward, and reason that can be challenged. And that challenge is the synthesis. It's the thing that helps us grow that helps us learn. Our failures in those moments become the defining articles, the things that help us hone in on the clear goals. It may be the voice in the back of our head, the eudaimonia, which Aristotle used as the good spirit, in our in the back of our mind. Earlier, when you look at Socrates, Socrates used the word Demone. To talk about the voice in his head. Why did he say the things he said why did he do the things he did? And when he was asked that question, he said, I only do what the voices in my head told me to do. It sounds a bit schizophrenic. Unless you look at it from the perspective that he was pushed by his conscience, both in virtue and abysmal failure at times. We get wounded and the process. Mistakes are not easy. But they do pave the way to consistency. They do pave the way to pattern and you guys know me by now. I love the idea of pattern. And that pattern creates momentum. And that momentum reinforces the fact that what we're doing is pointed in the right direction. And the longer picture is that we're developing virtue while acting out of virtue. Now, the term virtue, the idea of virtue, the idea of conscience, this all sounds great. But the truth is, we don't always function on virtue. And I would say that we don't even like virtue sometimes, because virtue itself means that there's a standard, a standard that we strive for. And under the surface, it's often the case that we're not striving to achieve one goal. But we're striving to grow as people striving to grow in means that allow us to understand ourselves and the world around us, that allow us to engage on deeper ideas of goodness, deeper ideas that maybe, maybe we are messed up, but maybe we're messed up in a good way. Maybe we're messed up in a way that points us to greater things. See, if I can't come to peace with myself, then it's very difficult to come to peace with the world around me. A lot of times people will criticize the feminist movement. And ironically, a lot of times, it's guys, not always, but a lot of times it is, and they don't understand it. Why why this feminist stuff? Well, if you want to really be honest, maybe feminism is not a movement that is independent of something else. Maybe feminism is an answer to the question of misogyny. And on a base level, misogyny is based on fear, the fear that the patriarchal system can fall at any minute. And that is men, we tend to struggle with a fear of competence that we're not good enough, we're not strong enough, we're not okay enough. And when you look at religious movements, when you look at the political movements, how many decisions have been made, how many sacrifices have been put at the altar of fear. And I would venture to say that quite a few, I would venture to say that more than three, more than five more than 10. But centuries, maybe millennia of decisions have been built on fear, not fear of women, but fear, fear of femininity, not fear of women's femininity, but men's fear of their own femininity. And if they can't come to play it to to peace, if I can't come to peace, and as a man with my own sense of femininity, then how am I going to appreciate what exists outside of it. And so the goal then is not to keep pushing forward and chugging along, ignoring my conscience, ignoring the needs that I have inside, but maybe, maybe the idea is to begin to dig inside and see why the fear of my femininity is so great, maybe it's the source of some of my own unhappiness. This is virtue. Virtue, is the ability to achieve to achieve happiness, by engaging in the things that are intellectually stimulating, and that drive us to excellent, Aristotle's words, not mine. And at the same time, Aristotle didn't dismiss the world around him. And as a matter of fact, Aristotle pushed the idea that friends, power and wealth should all be taken into account, not in the abusive sense, but in the virtuous terms. What to do with the friends around me, how do I lean on my community? How do I lean on my friends for support for answers when I don't have them? Or maybe just to experience being vulnerable with those who may be less in need than I am in this one situation is one circumstance. It also means that maybe I can be there for them when they need as well. It's a reciprocal benefit. It teaches me to be broken. But it teaches me that in my brokenness, I can move forward with my community. I can move forward with my family because none of us are put together well and we need Help. And sometimes we need help that goes far beyond our community. Aristotle looked at wealth and power and you can't, you can't dismiss the importance of those two things. And it doesn't mean wealth as in, I have to have millions of dollars in the bank, or I have to constantly be striving for the next opportunity to make money. And it doesn't fall in that Nietzschean category of a hunger to power. But I think what it looks at is the responsibility of wealth, the responsibility of power, and the virtue that's tied to it. When we think of long term happiness, what we're really looking at is the extent to which we can be at peace and comfort with the decisions and the motives. And the drive that takes place under the surface. It's not the what I do. It's the reasoning behind it, my actions can be interpreted 1000 different ways. But if my motivation is broken, than Am I truly happy? I think this is why we tend to emphasize influencers. Because what you're seeing is an outward picture of achievement and outward image of what looks so great. But we don't see what's on the inside. We connect with a character and, and really trend trenders Are our characters. They're caricatures of an idea of a person, we are looking through images and filters have images, and filters of filters of images. And we think somehow that that's the thing, that's the place that we want to go, this is the thing that we want to do, that's the person we want to be. But what we're settling for, is a filtered, filtered, filtered image that never touches the person beneath it. We've created a sense of community that's built on distance. Now, I'm not the person that's going to tell you that social media is the problem, and that it's the source of all of our issues. Absolutely not. But I do think it's an indicator that we're hungry for connection that we're hungry for acceptance. How many likes did I get on this post? How many likes did I get overall? How many people are following me? How many people are mi following? And at the end of the day, what we're really searching for is community. Are you connected with the world around you? Are you able to be broken with the world around you? Are you able to fall apart in the middle of the strivings in the middle of doing the things that are harder? Because you can do them? Not necessarily gearing the guaranteeing that you're going to do it without failure? Can you fall apart and be held by the community around you? Long term happiness is not the ability to find the answers. Long term happiness is the ability to sit in the mystery of things that will always be developing. If you look at any science, not just quantum physics, not just physics, biology, math, chemistry, what you find is that, at the end at the edge of all of those disciplines, no matter how many times no matter how many layers or how many years of development, what you find is that at the edge of all of them are mystery. Mystery is the thing that can drive us forward. Or it can be the thing that keeps us stuck. It keeps us stuck because we think sometimes that we should solve the greater issues and unless we solve the greater issues and have answers and have it all figured out, then we failed. Now see, in all of those philosophy classes that I was in, I experienced that fear of failing. I wanted the answers. I wanted to figure out the things that people had spent 1000 years writing on and sometimes longer. I sat with classmates who wanted to do the same and they thought that the purpose of this degree that by the time we received that piece of paper, we should have some answers. And we really missed the point. What we missed was the idea that in the midst of a lot of depressed guys through history, who also wanted to find the answers. The goal was to learn to sit in the mystery and the beauty of the things that we don't know. And that's a valuable concept. Because if I can understand my limitations, if I can understand that expectations are not all encompassing, then I can begin to play, I can begin to enjoy the mystery itself. And sometimes I can just lay back and not feel like I'm stressed and burdened with the task of figuring out humanity, when I can't figure out myself. Sometimes I can just breathe. And I can tell you in those years, maybe, and I can't speak for other degree programs, I can't speak for our students in different majors. But I can tell you this, that there are a lot of nights that were I went home and tears, tears because I thought I should have the answers, and I sat with other students who were good friends. And they also would go home in tears because their world had been challenged, their presuppositions had been pushed to the edge, and to the limits. And if, if those presuppositions can be pushed, and torn apart than what was left, we were at the edge of our virtue. And yet, the challenge of our virtue, the challenge of our understanding, the push beyond the boundary wasn't to get us to a place of having answers. It was getting us to a place where we could be at peace at the edge of the cliff looking into the abyss. That sounds terrifying. And believe me it is. But that's also life. When I look at anxiety, and I look at depression, it's the fear of the unknown. It's the fear of what could be what probably will be the fear that maybe I'll never amount to anything, maybe the people behind me were right, maybe I should be happy with what I had, maybe I should feel guilty and half the time I do. And on and on and on the questions go. And the guilt piles up in the shame mounts. But at the core is fear. Fear of not being enough fear of not being wanted all things based in community. It's interesting to me that when you look at disorders like anxiety and depression, the symptoms are very similar. And one of those symptoms is isolation. And sadly, when you look at most disorders, isolation plays its role in the process. Why do we shut down? Why? Why do we avoid the community that helps us understand our virtue that helps us challenge it. And ultimately helps us grow to a point of sitting in mystery and being able to rest. We don't like that idea. It's a bit discomforting. And we live in a strangely complicated pragmatic world that says, well, it is what it is. And yet we log into social media, and we don't question the technology that went into developing it or the failures that went into making it happen, or the crazy complexity that is involved in seeing a simple image much less communicating with the world around us. We live in a world that has the possibility of great, great, great community. But that's not the end. It's not the stopping place. In some ways. It's the beginning. And we have to wrestle with what is the next step in the process, not because we are stuck, not because it proves that we're good enough that we're strong enough, but in some ways to learn to stand at the edge and breathe. That's the challenge. And just anxiety and depression will play a role in that. It's the fear, the fear of not getting it together and not having enough the fear of what if. And what if those are two powerful words because the are usually tied to the limitations, and the failures and the ideas of failures and the concept of failures. And if we strive hard enough to try to deny them and to hide them, and to push them deeper, we don't deal with them, we just bury them deeper in embracing our limitations, allowing ourselves to breathe at the edge of the cliff, slowing down, beginning a small step in the risk of self acceptance. These are the things that bring peace. Am I okay? As a faulty person, and just maybe you're not as faulty as me. It wouldn't take much effort to be less faulty. But I'm at peace with that. I'm okay. And I hope you're more put together than I am. But I think that risk is essential. Now, I want to close out, what is the voice in the back of your head? What is? What is your Demone? And what is the Eudaimonia that pushes you forward? The good spirit, the good voice? Or is bad voice the thing that tells you you're not enough? Are those voices your voices are those the voices of people who tried to cap you who tried to limit you who tried to tell you that you were never going to be enough? We're not fighting the battle of the world, we're fighting the battle of our hearts. And our hearts are hungry, they're hungry for connection, they're hungry for knowledge, and they're hungry to be known. And those are terrifying things. And why would we choose to do them? Maybe because they are the hard things. And maybe because it's the next virtuous step. It's the next place that our abilities and our skills get challenged. And it may be the the thing that pushes us not towards accepting the world around us necessarily, but maybe accepting ourselves. Happiness, in the long term sense, is self acceptance. self acceptance in the midst of our faults, nobody knows us, like we know ourselves. And sometimes we don't like what we see. And sometimes we don't want to know ourselves at all. Sometimes we wish we could move out to move out of our chaotic busy heads. And maybe that's the edge of the cliff, the edge of the cliff that we stand at and become at peace with maybe it's the mystery that we look into. Maybe it's the the abyss that we stare into that, as Nietzsche said, from his perspective, if you stare or if you gaze into the abyss long enough, eventually the Abyss gazes back. Now, Nietzsche had a different outlook on life. I do like some of the existential qualities, but you have to give him credit he was consistent. He did succumb to his own hopelessness. But what if standing at the edge of the cliff is not about staring into an abyss of hopelessness? What if it's staring into the abyss, the abyss of design, what if beneath the surface of our own self hatred, there's someone worth loving? And you guys know enough about me by now that you know, I don't usually go into this direction. I like the sciences. I like the facts I like I like the structure. I like the patterns. I like consistency. But on this one unhappiness, our lack of happiness is telling us that we're we're made for more understanding that and coming to peace with that is the goal. So Justin, I hope that answers some of your question. If not message me, let me know. And you and I can connect and if we need to do another episode on it, we'll do another episode on it. But remember, at the core, you are a person that is not an accident. You are a person with a great purpose. And I don't mean that in such an ideologically scat The way I mean it in a sincere way, your questions, your your observations of the things that need to happen that need to be done, the things that pull on your happiness. Those are the things that will compel you to move forward, and will compel you to take the steps and in your virtue, you'll grow. And you'll find your happiness. All right, guys. This is a tough subject. And I wish it was one that there was a simple answer to man, I would love that. But nonetheless, it's a journey. I am excited. It's so excited to go on this journey with you guys. We all have our faults, we all have our weaknesses. And we're kind of all on the road together. You guys are sending such great emails and messages. And I want to address all of them so much. I will be recording all day long. And it would be something that I would love to do. But I'm working to get to your questions as quickly as I can. Keep sending them though. Keep sending your thoughts, some of your insights or some of your insights are so well put, and so well thought out. And I like it. So keep them coming in. If you are new to the show, and you have questions and you want to answers, you can contact us at info at quiet chaos kw.com or on Instagram, at quiet chaos kW. If you get a chance, if you're bored over the holiday or over the weekend, you can pick up the book quiet chaos, the link between anxiety and awareness. Give me your thoughts. Give me your feedback. And when you finish listening to the podcast, hit hit the like button, give us a couple stars, maybe five stars if you really like it. And leave a review. Tell us what you think. coming up in January, we do have a couple of great series. I have three amazing guests that we've been recording to to get the first three part series done. It's trauma and overcoming it. And man, these guys bring some great insight we are what you guys are in for in for a great series. After that we're going to cover woundedness what does it mean to be hurt? And what does the process of forgiveness look like? It might be a little different than you think. Because we don't like that when we're hurt. We don't really like that idea of forgiveness. We feel like we're giving up something. But I think the people in this series are going to really challenge us I know I've felt challenged on this topic. And I think they have some great insight coming. So keep keep up with us. January night, the first part of that first series on trauma will air and then the second series will air after that. So keep tuned in stay with it and have a great week. I will check in with you guys next week. This is Jason signing off.

Intro: 53:36

You've been listening to the quiet chaos podcast. Our passion is to talk about anxiety, depression in disorders and answering tough questions. But having fun doing it coming at you with facts, interviews, hard to discuss topics and a little bit more rebellious than your typical mental health show. We hope you've enjoyed it. Make sure to like rate and review and we'll be back soon. But in the meantime, hit us up on Instagram at quiet chaos kW. Remember, there is hope even when your brain tells you there isn't. See you next time on the quiet chaos podcast.