What makes you a happy person?

#1

Happiness is a weird thing. It can come from internal or external places.

I like to look at being drunk to see things in a different light. Let me explain...

• You stop worrying about what decisions you are making because your body is trying to just stay alive and functioning so it dedicates less to actually giving a fuck about outcome. Strangely enough this ends up giving you generally pretty positive results.
• You become joyous over things that have not even changed in your environment. You didn't suddenly become rich. You didn't suddenly become more handsome. You didn't suddenly become a better dancer. You just are enjoying what you already have. The simple things in life. You stop worrying so much.

Now sure there are some downsides to drinking but the point I am trying to make here is that generally NOTHING in your life has changed between being sober and becoming drunk.

So there is that... just enjoying the little things. Moving on...

#2

There are many types of hobbies out there. I like to categorize them into two slots.

• Personal
• Social

Of course you can combo them but most of the time they fit into one or the other. I honestly think seddit should put together a list for both categories. Just a few...

Personal

• Video games
• Cooking
• Building things
• Working on a car
• Sewing
• Reading
• Making websites
• Painting
• Playing an instrument

Social

• Playing pool
• Darts
• Parties
• Cannoo trips
• Mountain bike riding
• Chess
• Poker
• Dancing

To be happy it is generally good if you have both personal and social hobbies. I would try to outweigh your life in favor of social hobbies to get a good social group. Then you can generally move them into personal things and hanging out more often than going out all the time which gets exhausting and expensive.

This also gives you things to talk about. It seems that people enjoy sharing a lot as it makes them feel important. Hence the reason any of us even post on reddit. Generally I don't think we actually think about why but we just do. So because of this it is good to ask questions about things but also be able to share as well. People like to share but if you give nothing back then you are annoying person to be around. Nobody likes someone who is all share OR all take. A good conversation is a combination between sharing a little and listening a lot. Try to listen a lot but you have to be ABLE to share at times to continue or steer the conversation.

This connection with others will make you feel real and human and not nuts. This is where a lot of external happiness seems to come from. A real connection makes us feel good about ourselves. So when you can provide the same for another human it creates a good bond in that both of you want to come back for seconds.

If you are always providing value but never get anything in return you probably will want to stop providing value as you may feel used. Gaining always feels better than giving.

Something that has bugged me for a while has been that I know a shit load about a shit load and I generally have the answers to what people are talking about so it's hard for me to actually want to listen to something I already have in my mind. This makes me bored of the other person and as sharing more than listening makes me seem like an asshole it makes the conversation seem unbalanced. Patience is important at this point. Sometimes you have to wait and see if they have a nugget you don't have yet.

So if you know a lot of shit then try to find people that are diverse from what you know and try to learn things they know that you don't know. Making jokes seems to break up this problem in conversation.

Conversation seems to pertain to:

• Gossip / News (to me this is garbage but to some it's interesting)
• Problem solving / Theoretical Problem solving (generally based on gossip or news)
• Sharing information about hobbies or the other persons knowledge base
• Sharing stories for common ground (like about their childhood etc. My favorite type of convo. Creates good bonds)

So from those things (I may have missed something ... fuck I am human so I probably did) you can see that hobbies and experiences are very big if you want to be interesting to anyone or even to yourself.

Conclusions

• Have lots of personal interests
• Know about life
• Do lots of diverse things to gain experiences you can share stories and epiphanies about

By doing those three things you have tapped into internal happiness as well as external happiness. If you can feel good about your decisions in life and what you have learned and what you like to do then you should be internally validated. This should give you great chances to have external validation added on top of that.

Think of it this way... external validation is like extras on a vehicle. Some external validations are required and very much almost needed. Like on a car you probably want and would require AC / Heat, radio with CD player and electric locks. Those things are not nessesary for the vehicle to move or your safety but are very much a common extra that is added. So the car itself and the extras that are common would be very much like internal validation with tiny bits of external added. Extras on the car however like: nice rims, leather seats, dvd player, etc. would be very much like external validation and happiness. Unnessesary but fucking awesome and attainable. You can't have external very easy without the nessesary internal.

NOTE: I will probably update the shit out of this if we get enough feedback going on to make it easy to polish this turd.