The Road to Happiness
Want to find more happiness? Add more challenge to your life.
There’s something that I’ve come to learn from my sustainability journey: challenge always appears hard, but the result is always more happiness. When you challenge yourself to do something, it’s likely to be something you aspire to; a change to take you a step closer to who you want to be.
I’ve seen it over and over again, and today I wanted to share some examples of what I mean.
My Own Experiences
Picking Up Trash
If you’ve read my blog before, you’ve probably heard this one already, but I’ll tell it again. When I first started my sustainability journey, I decided to start with a challenge to pick up one piece of trash every day for 1 month: it’s easy to do since I already walk my dog daily, it’s a good challenge that I can post to social media with, and I of course eliminate some waste that will eventually end up in the ocean. It turned out that it wasn’t quite so simple. There were some unexpected difficulties, but also some unexpected benefits as well! In short, I found that doing something every single day without missing a day is really hard. At first. There are times you forget or the weather is bad. Then there are days when you just don’t feel like it. But I also realized something else: I started to feel a new sense of stewardship over my neighborhood. For the first time ever, it started to feel like this neighborhood was MINE. I was proud of it. And getting out and not just looking at my phone while walking the dog led to realizing how nice of a neighborhood I lived in. I ended up appreciating it so much more. All for one piece of trash per day. And now I can’t walk around WITHOUT picking up at least one piece of trash when I see it! It feels good to!
If you’re interested in seeing more, see my post on my 30-day pick-up-trash challenge:
Reducing My Meat Consumption
These days it’s cool to be vegan: trendy vegan restaurants are popping up all over the place and you can buy more substitute meat and dairy products than ever before. But like most people who try a vegan diet, I realized one thing: it’s hard. I knew enough about taking on these kinds of challenges that I shouldn’t just try to go full on vegan (or even vegetarian) to start, so I just told myself this: whenever I have the choice to eat meatless, I do. At the start, it was mostly just going to restaurants and if there was a vegetarian choice, that was what I was eating. But doing it at home felt harder: eliminating meat from everything I cook was NOT easy. But the same thought always sat in the back of my head: COULD this be vegetarian? COULD I make this without meat? And eventually, that started to affect what I buy at the supermarket. I started to learn that I could replace meat with mushrooms in some dishes. Tofu in others. I started to try new recipes that I had never even considered making. And now, I’m to the point where I barely eat meat at all. I’m not vegetarian, but I only eat meat a few times a week, and in very small amounts. Almost never beef. I thought there would be less variety in my diet without meat. And I found that now I have MORE variety in my diet. Not less. More enjoyment and more appreciation for foods, even meat since it’s now rare that I eat it.
Starting a Job and Biking to Work
This one was possibly even harder than reducing my meat consumption. After moving to Hawaii I got a new job. Yay! But the main office is 26 miles away from my home. And we only have one car that my wife needs during the day. Uh oh. I started to look into electric cars because that’s what seemed the most environmentally-friendly. But a car is expensive: the cost of the car, the cost of the electricity to power it (yes, less than gasoline but more than nothing), and insurance is expensive. Blech. It didn’t feel good, so I started to think about other options: if only I was closer…I could bike to work and then have NO emissions at all from my commute!
I ended up looking into bus schedules and found there’s a bus that goes from near my home to near my office! In one bus! And only costs $2.70 each way! (I calculated it, the gasoline cost in my car would be about $5-6 each way.) But it also meant waking up at 5:50am so I could get to work on time. The first few days, I’ll admit, it felt awful…Dragging myself out of bed as my body fought to keep the sleep schedule it used to almost hurt. But within days I started to get used to it. And I started to appreciate the benefits: I’m getting so much more exercise than I used to. The bike ride in the morning is so peaceful. My day is longer. My neighborhood has a variety of ah-hem colorful characters that I start to get to know: it starts to feel like MY neighborhood. It starts to feel familiar. And now, the idea of switching to a car and having to sit in traffic feels so much worse to me than the bike + bus. Ugh, sitting in traffic? Nope, I’ll take my exercise and my reading/Netflix time, thanks.
More Challenge = More Happiness
I have more examples, but I think that these illustrate the point well enough: when you challenge yourself to change in ways that align with your own beliefs and morals and give yourself restrictions that you truly believe in, you learn to adapt.
This isn’t just in the realm of sustainability and environment, either: the same thinking applies to your relationship with your friends and family or with the things you do with your spare time, just to name a couple. When you challenge yourself and succeed, you find that your life becomes more fulfilling because you’ve grown. You’ve become better. You’ll find more joy in doing the things you do because there is no internal conflict in doing them. You are living the way that makes you feel good.
Ask yourself, what do you value? Then challenge yourself to change. Challenge yourself to find happiness.
verdant growth
Is it easy? Nope. Every time I try to start something new, it feels hard. I have a strong desire to keep doing things the old way. I fail over and over. But every time I fail, I learn something new, and I get ever-so-slightly better at doing whatever the new challenge is, whether it be shorter/colder showers, buying more things used, or biking to work.
Eventually, it just becomes my new normal. It becomes just another day of how I live. And every now and then, I stop and think about what I’m doing and I feel proud. I feel hapiness. Real happiness, the kind that comes from knowing you’re living well. Living the way you want to. Living in line with your own values.
To me, that’s more important than being rich, having the newest iPhone, or driving a Ferrari…Those things that bring you temporary, shallow, excitement or pleasure…Until you get used to having them around and they just become your new normal, and you just end up wanting the next new thing to give you your next hit. Because in the end, what are all of those things, if you aren’t truly happy? There’s nothing wrong with owning a Ferrari, but what’s the point in having a Ferrari if you aren’t happy with the way you live?
Seek real happiness. And real happiness only comes from challenge. But be sure that they are challenge that you believe in and align with your own values. Lying to yourself won’t help the changes stick. So ask yourself, what do you value? Then challenge yourself to change. Challenge yourself to find happiness.
Oh yeah, and if you are interested in making your life better for the planet, challenge yourself to live in a way that is environmentally conscious. Or as I call it, to Live ECO.
