Meditations in applied intelligence
Happiness — Investment & Strategy
Perry C. Douglas
Living a purposeful life with long-term goals can drive your authentic happiness, goals trigger passions and the zest for living, which can be one of the most powerful drivers of human happiness.
To change your life, however, you have to apply intelligence and go after life-changing pursuits, because change can only happen when you decide to change yourself first.
So, if you want to live a happy life, attach it to a goal. No one is entitled to being happy. Happiness must be worked for, and authentic happiness is not about having fun. It’s significantly more immense than that. Happiness is the aggregate of what you put into it, what you invest and the strategy that underlies it. So, in the modern age, an investment in relative technologies, for example, to augment your existence whether it be for work or play, or the use of a mental health or wellness app or working virtually so you have more time for your family. Technology is highly useful for living.
Therefore, technology isn’t only advantageous to businesses to make them more efficient in creating value. Technology is also very useful, and effective to humans in maximizing the value of their time — your time and place in the universe is minuscule, so augment it through the usefulness of relative tech to create space and time for you to live well. Logically, if technology makes your life more efficient, and it does, then it can make you more effective towards your goals and aspirations too; hence, technology is a major player in human-life-value creation.
Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. — Aristotle
So don’t wait for life to happen, you have to make life happen yourself and it requires investment into life and a strategy to live and achieve. If not, you just end up manifesting your misery, blaming others for your suffering instead of taking responsibility for your own. Design your happiness through your defined purpose and individual values, setting your priorities and doing the necessary work in pursuit of that beautiful authentic happiness.
Working for happiness requires living in consciousness more than subconsciousness, being mindful and intentional about what you do, and the tasks and activities that you take on. If you don’t prioritize these activities, you will waste a lot of valuable time. Everything can’t be a priority, so unfocused activities act as distractions, and then it becomes harder to define the important and impactful tasks in your life. You become rudderless in your navigation. The investments you make in life must always be attached to a strategy, otherwise, there can be no good execution, no return on investment, and no measurement, and so, no value can be created. If your focus is just on healthy living and spirituality, focus your time investment there, and create a realistic strategy that can facilitate it.
If you are searching for meaning in your life, then put meaning into your activities. You are in search of deeper knowledge and wisdom you say? Then are you reading the classic philosophies, the ancient stoics for example? Are you reading one of the greatest Black thinkers, like Franz Fanon? A psychiatrist that explained the confused Black human condition in his outstanding analysis of colonialism and decolonization, in his classic book, The Wretched of the Earth; a book on how both of those experiences messed up (for lack of a better more practical descriptive word) Black minds and left their psyches damaged. Or are you on Facebook making yourself stupider, looking for Likes? Hint! Life is straightforward, it’s about what you do and not about what you say you want to do. You can’t fake it; you’re only fooling yourself in the end.
