The following is a transcript of the above video, edited for readability.

I think there’s a sort of mainstream understanding of how happiness is almost all-inclusive and elusive and just kind of ephemeral. Kind of vague, kind of general. There’s a lot of different ways to conceive of happiness. I would say that I don’t really think in terms of happiness very much. I think that it’s a bit of a moving target, something that you can’t quite reach by reaching out for it. I once wrote a blog post many years ago about how the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” is kind of a losing game. It’s kind of set up to fail because of the hedonic treadmill – as you pursue pleasure and you acquire pleasure, you get acclimatized to it, and you need more and more pleasure to feel the same amount of happiness.

My broad understanding from a cursory reading of the literature about happiness says that there’s a few things that people lump together when they talk about happiness. They talk about pleasure – physical pleasure from eating great food, getting a massage, having sex, things that are intrinsically pleasing, physically.

Then there is purpose. Meaning. The idea that you are doing something significant and substantial with your life, something that fulfills your narrative, something that makes you feel purposeful. You could live a life with very little pleasure and yet derive a lot of satisfaction from doing something that you think is right and good.

Then there’s flow which is a kind of pleasure that you get from doing an activity in a state that allows you to kinda transcend your consciousness. People experience it while dancing, while playing music at a high level, being in the zone in sports, in comedy, in making videos even. That’s a kind of “state-based pleasure” that comes from a kind of transcendence.

For me I find I don’t really think of myself as trying to hyper-optimize for any one of those things. I think they are like multiple kinds of meters. You have multiple meters in life, like fuel meters. If you haven’t eaten in a while you start to get hungry. You notice when you’re thirsty, you notice when you’re sleepy. Each of these things, when they start to deplete past a certain threshold, you become conscious of it and then you try to do something about it. So if you’re hungry and you’re sleepy but you haven’t slept in a couple of days you’re probably gonna fall asleep before you find food. But if you haven’t eaten in weeks then the prospect of food is going to be more tantalizing, even if you’re slightly sleepy. Something like that. It’s more complex but you get the idea.

I think people often think of happiness as something related to self-esteem. If you can think highly of yourself, if you can like yourself, then you are happy, and if you don’t like yourself then you are not happy. I’m not a fan of self-esteem as a concept. I remember doing a bunch of reading about It long ago when I was a teenager. There was this idea of conditional self-esteem – which is you know if you like yourself because you think you’re smart then you will feel pressured to maintain that narrative that you’re smart. There are some kinds of traps along that path, where you start to avoid things that make you feel not smart. Which is dangerous, because to get to new levels of smart you have to work through things that will make you feel not smart. You have to try and do things that are difficult, challenging, unfamiliar. And so youif you want to build your self-image on your intelligence you will have to have a more complex formulation of what intelligence is. I would bypass that game entirely. 

I think what is preferable to self-esteem is self-respect. I think that’s a better frame. I’m sure they’re related, right, it’s all concepts, and you can choose what kind of concepts you want to use to navigate your life. I think of self-respect as something that is grounded in a belief system that is kind of deeper, more fundamental. I respect myself for having made progress on my goals, and when i say goals, I’m not too fixated on any one particular goal. It’s more about attunement with my values and principles.

Thinking back to when I felt unhappy – it can be easier to try to be less unhappy than to try to be more happy. I think being more happy is… a bunch of it is about gratitude, a bunch of it is about appreciation, even just sitting down and doing a gratitude exercise where you think about where you are in life and you think about all the things that you have that you have received from from others, or even from yourself – to live in a country that is safe, to have access to clean water, food, money in the bank, people who love me… I don’t currently have a job but if I needed a job I could get one because I have relationships with people that I have put in the time and effort to build. Once you’ve done a bunch of work to improve your life situation, it’s easier to be happy. 

That’s not universally true, though. I have met people who are far more accomplished than I am, who have far more assets and resources than I do, who are less happy. Why? I think it boils down to their expectations, their beliefs about what they are supposed to be doing. Their beliefs about how their life is supposed to be. So a lot of happiness is about – i’m reminded now of this zen pencils comic – somebody says to a monk, I want happiness! and then the monk responds, first you know remove the “I”, that’s ego, that’s identity, that’s your fixation on yourself, which is not helping you. Then remove the “want”, because that’s desire, and fixation on desire is not healthy either. Then all you’re left with is happiness!

I think there’s a truth to that. I think when you transcend yourself, I think it is possible to reflect on the limitations of the identity and to see that the self – my name is Visakan – whatever the person, is very much a kind of construct. an idea. It’s an interface. Why do we have names? We have names so that we can talk to other people. We can introduce ourselves, people can introduce us. It’s for interfacing with other faces. It’s for being able to have conversations and being able to get through everyday life…

The self is a good servant and a terrible master. When you allow yourself to be something that is you know it’s a servant it’s something that serves that should serve you you shouldn’t be living your life trying to puff yourself up. There is this series of articles by the social media theorist Nathan Jurgensen where he talks about the person-profile dialectic. What it simply means is, when you create your facebook profile, your instagram profile, your twitter profile – whatever it is, that representation simultaneously creates you back. Say you go on a holiday and you want to take a nice photo so of yourself, or of scenery, so that you can post it on your social media so that you can show other people (and yourself!) that these are places you have been to, and that you’re the kind of person that does that kind of thing. You may find yourself compelled to make a trip to somewhere in a certain location to look for the instagram-worthy locations or and take those photos to signal those things.

So the profile has now influenced your behavior, your profile has created you, just as you have created your profile. That’s not necessarily a bad thing intrinsically. But it’s something to be mindful of because if you’re completely dominated by your profile, your profile in turn is shaped by whatever competitive forces that are that turn social media into a game of one-upmanship or whatever. You don’t really have much of a choice in terms of what that game is like, but you do have a choice in terms of whether or not you’re going to play it, or what are the terms on which you’re gonna play it right. Eg i’m playing the youtube game here, and it would be tempting to try and do whatever it takes to get as many subscribers as possible as quickly as possible, get as many likes comments shares subscribes whatever… and those things are nice, but i don’t want to modify my fundamental taste and vision and voice to serve that. That would make me unhappy.

I’m reminded now of a video by Michelle Phan – a famous beauty vlogger, one of the OGs, one of the first few people to do a beauty vlog on youtube. She made this video about why she left youtube. It’s a very well-told story about her life – how when she started doing it she was doing it out of passion. That was before people were making money on youtube. She wasn’t trying to monetize it or anything, she was just sharing her love for makeup. She talks about how her mom was a beautician who made people happy by doing makeup for them. She talks about how the opportunity grew and she became successful by certain conventional metrics, and she got all this attention. And attention is a kind of currency – it’s a kind of capital that you can sell for money or you can trade for other things. And then you know as she got a bigger amount of currency, people wanted a slice of that, and then she felt compelled – because it’s like you’re doing this thing and the world is reacting in a certain way, rewarding you in a certain way, and it’s very tempting to fall into the prestige trap, the default assumption that if you have an opportunity to make money, you’re almost irresponsible for not taking it. 

I think she told a very compelling story about how she got everything– she got more than she thought she wanted, more than she dared to believe, and yet she found herself unhappy. It’s really something. People who never get to taste that kind of success might think of it as sour grapes, or, you know, boohoo, rich person complaining about their wealth – but Ii’ve done a lot of reading on this and it’s absolutely fascinating. I do think that, when people tell you what they’re going through, you should generally believe them as a first cut. There will be people who are not telling the truth, but you can kind of figure that out. You shouldn’t begin with the assumption that everyone is lying to you.

I think she’s right. And I think a lot of people who become successful in some conventional sense find that what came with it was more than what they were prepared for. There were trade-offs that they were not expecting. That’s true of anything that you do, right. It’s always more than you expect. There’s always more detail. Reality has a surprising amount of detail. And so you should not depend on achieving some goal or crossing some milestone, making some amount of money, getting some number of subscribers… you shouldn’t depend on those things to be happy. To “define your worth”, in a sense.

“Define your worth” i feel is very tricky – I really don’t even  like using that word. You shouldn’t really be thinking “How much am I worth?” That’s a frame that you lose. You lose the game before you even start playing, in a sense. Right. You should not be trying to define your worth.

You should figure out what you’re excited about. I think excitement is something that is very great to navigate by. As long as there’s something in your life that you’re excited about, you can keep living. Even if you’re not swimming in pleasure every day, even if you’re not in flow… I was in flow for a couple of weeks just publishing a video every day and that felt very good, and then i got tired and i took a break for a day or two and then now i’m back – but even when i’m not in flow, I still feel good because there are things i’m excited about. I’m excited about continuing to make more videos, I’m excited about writing my ebooks, I’m excited about going through my journals and reaching a new synthesis about all the things that I care about.

And having things that you’re excited about, I think, is a close enough proxy to happiness – it might not be happiness itself, but it provides you with… it very quickly i think aligns you with getting to a place that that can make you happy.I’ve seen kind of semi-extreme cases where people on reddit have said things like, i’m depressed and suicidal but the thing that keeps me going is that i want to watch the next star wars movie, or watch the next avengers movie. I think it’s very easy for people to condescend to those people and be like, “Oh, that’s that’s your source of meaning in life? That’s so pathetic” or whatever. I don’t think that’s fair. It’s just survival instinct. They’re just looking for something to hold on to. Joel says to Ellie in The Last of Us that you have to keep finding something new to fight for. I agree. I think that as long as you’re here, you should try to frame things for yourself in a way that makes you want to keep going. I mean that’s the central assumption. Assuming that you want to be around. There is the exit. I don’t want to get into in this video but you know, you’re not obliged to stay. 

I will say that I have on a couple of occasions, at my most depressed, contemplated leaving. But what does that achieve, right? The world moves on. People forget you. I mean, the world will move on and people will forget you at the end of your life anyway, eventually. Eventually you have the heat death of the universe and everything will be gone but anyway…

if you’re maximally frustrated with your circumstances you can always take pretty drastic action to change things. You can leave town, go to another country. Different people have different circumstances, and you may have dependents, or you may have things that just kind of seem futile, but I think being able to imagine a way out can keep you going. People have endured incredible hardship on this earth. People have been unjustly jailed for 20 years or more. Nelson Mandela was in prison for 27 years. It’s having something that you care about that’s greater than yourself that you want to participate in, you want to contribute to in some way – I think that is the source of, not necessarily joy or tremendous meaning, but it’s something to keep going. You need to keep going in order to then get to do more things or get to experience new things and you have to have imagination.

One of my riffs is that the imagination deficit is the most staggering thing in the human realm but most people don’t realize it because most people can’t imagine what the lack of imagination is doing to us. We just go about our day every day for months, years, decades and not consider that if you don’t like your life you can change it. If changing is not easy, you can plan a change. I don’t know how difficult it will be for everyone else, but for me when I started… My first big change was when I got married. I bought my house, got a job, moved out – and then my life felt like a jail sentence. Even though I loved my wife and I loved my job! I just felt like, Oh my god, my mortgage takes 30 years to pay off, I’ve been working for 3-4 years, every day feels like drudgery. It’s the same thing over and over again, is this what my life is going to be like for the next 25 years?

While the idea of that was painful and depressing in some way and you know it’s been 7-8 years since that – I think I had a feeling that things would change in some way that I could not anticipate. And I found out that it was true about 5 years in. I left my job at 5.5 years, and the past couple of years have been amazing for me. I mean the pandemic has been annoying, it canceled my travel trips and stuff, but I did spend five plus years – while i was working, i wouldn write in the evenings and at night, and i would tweet, right, and for many years nobody gave a fuck about my twitter or my blog or anything. But I did. Nobody else cared, But I cared. Because I wanted to be a writer. Because I loved books as a kid and I committed myself to saying that even if I never achieved success or acclaim or any kind of recognition, as long as I’m doing what I love, that has to be enough for me. Everything else on top is bonuses.

I enjoy words, I like reading and writing, I would like to continually get better at reading and writing, and I believe that if you do anything with all your heart for 30 years you will get really world-class good at it, and when you get that good people can’t ignore you. And then if you’re moderately intelligent it becomes relatively trivial to get compensated for it. I believed that it was possible for me to leave my job – which I enjoyed and found meaningful as far as the options that I had in front of me were concerned – but I was looking for something even more than that. That at the time I perhaps did not “deserve”. But I wanted to earn it, and that gave me something to hold on to while everything else was collapsing. My writing habit. 

So here I am, living my best life as best as I can. I would say I’m happy. There are other things that I’m kind of unhappy about. I’m still sad and grieving that I didn’t get to go to New York and meet dozens of friends, and i didn’t get to go to Mumbai or Bangalore – i have all these friends in cities around the world that I want to visit, but i can’t right now, and that makes me very sad. But I can still connect with them, right. I can still write to them, chat with them, do a video call. God bless Twitter, God bless Zoom.

I think people are trained to be helpless. It’s called learned helplessness and it’s a challenge to unlearn that. Very often you need someone else – you know so with studies… the ethics of it is kind of bleak but they did this thing where they do electric shocks on dogs, some at random and some at certain intervals, and when you shock a dog randomly, if i remember correctly, what happens if they just give up. They don’t don’t bother trying to avoid it after a while, and so you have to physically drag them out of the the cage or wherever it is that they’re in that administers the shock before they see for themselves that, hey, actually i don’t need to be in this place where i’m getting shocks! Actually getting electric shocks is not something that is a universal thing about reality, but about that narrow context that i’m in! And sometimes you need somebody to drag you out of the space that you’re in.

We have blinders on all the time. We experience a tiny fragment of what reality is and then it’s very natural to assume that the way your life has been so far it’s how things are going to be. If people have been mean to you, you assume that everyone’s going to be mean to you. That’s not true! You don’t know that! The world is a very big place. That’s true for good and bad as well. The world is better and worse than you think it is, even if you think you know it very well. People always surprise you. I guess you have to learn to enjoy being surprised. Enjoy is a little bit of a loaded word, but you have to roll with it, right. It’s like surfing waves. You will fall, and you have to get back up and surf again. You have to find a way to enjoy that.

You have to find a way to laugh. I think a sense of humor is very important too. Which isn’t necessarily about laughing at everything – particularly, it shouldn’t be about condescending to people or laughing at other people’s misfortune. Rather it’s laughter at the intrinsic absurdity of life itself, which manifests in a lot of different ways, right. I think if you can’t laugh, if you can’t enjoy laughter then you’re gonna get anxious and neurotic and that will lead to a kind of unhappiness. So you have to be able to laugh. You have to be able to find things that you’re excited about, and if you fail you have to be okay with that. 

Initially, you probably won’t be. I wasn’t. Initially I was very frustrated and upset that I would fail. There’s this idea of effort shock, when you find out how difficult things really are and how long it takes to get successful at anything. you know fairy tales should come with warning labels because they make it seem– in action movies or whatever– because they make it seem like– there’s a Cracked article that talks about this – like there’s like some montage where the hero has very strong feelings, and then works out really hard for what appears to be a short period of time, and then they win the fight. In reality olympians are training 99.99% of the time, and the competition day is like one day in 2000 days or something like that. So you have to learn to enjoy the training. You can’t just be forcing yourself into training that you find unpleasant because you’re pinning all your hopes and dreams on winning a trophy that you might not get. You have to enjoy the work.

You have to find work that you enjoy. I can hear someone saying, that’s a luxury some of us cannot afford. Sure. So if you have to do some shit work that you don’t like because of your circumstances, you have dependents, you have bills to pay, then I would say, carve out 20 minutes a day to do what you love. You have to figure out what you love, whatever it is. And it doesn’t need to be the same thing always. What you believe you love at age 20 it doesn’t need to be what you’re doing at 30 or 40. You just need to have that practice of carving out a little bit of time for yourself and doing what you think is beautiful. I think 20 minutes a day is reasonable to ask of anyone. I’m not asking you to do it. You know if you want to do it. I can’t force you and I don’t want to force you. If you’re happy being miserable then be miserable!

There’s a part of it that’s about the elimination of coercion, which I have a separate video about.

You can’t coerce yourself into happiness. That’s a very important point. You can’t force yourself to be happy. You can’t bully yourself into being happy. You can’t shame and embarrass yourself into being happy. Happiness is what happens when you remove all of those elements, and you reduce the muscular tension in your body from having all these competing ideas and stress and and back pain and whatnot. If you have chronic illnesses – I do believe that people without chronic illnesses and ailments underestimate the degree to which those things you know drive people to the edge. I think people with allergies like very bad allergies they’re actually likelier to commit suicide than I think even the average depressed person. Don’t quote me on that, but i feel like there’s some stats about that – like just unbearable physical pain that doesn’t seem to be going away and you can’t figure out a coping mechanism of some kind – then that’s unbearable in the most fundamental sense.

I don’t have any advice for people dealing with that. I’m not gonna pretend to have all the answers. I can’t speak about things that I don’t have experience with. but you know, I think maybe some things are an allergy of the brain. I’ve been depressed a couple of times, real bad in my experience. Debilitating. I can’t get myself to go to work – I mean I go to work, but I’m not there. I felt like my existence was a prison,  it felt just like bleak. Nothing to be excited about, nothing to look forward to, just surviving day by day. I had that for several months, twice. It might happen again. The second time, the circumstances were worse than the first time. But because I got through the first time, the second time I did have at least the belief that I’m gonna get through it somehow eventually. And I did.

And I’m pretty confident now that the next time I have some kind of depressive episode… it doesn’t feel like it’s gonna happen anytime soon, but I wouldn’t bet against me having it. Because life will surprise you. You have to let life surprise you. The more certainty you have about life, I find, past a certain threshold, then it just gets depressing again. Because what’s the point of living life if you already know everything that’s going to happen, and you already know how things are going to play out, and there’s no surprise? But life always finds a way to surprise you, because the world is so big and complex and there’s always crazy shit happening. It might not be pleasant surprises, but it’s new challenges, new contexts.

I would also say that a very critical thing is relationships with other people. I think if you’re living alone in your own head with yourself, that can make things very bleak. I think we are social creatures very fundamentally. I think it’s possible even that we were social creatures before we learned to be individuals, before we developed consciousness and whatnot humans were a pack animal, right? And so I think that healthy social relations is a very important part of happiness. There’s a whole bunch of studies about this but the way I think about it is– make sure that you’re always periodically trying to help someone else out. For free, just for the sake of it. Talk to someone who needs talking to. Ask people how they’re doing. Listen to people. Be there for people. Ask them how they’re doing, if they need help with anything. 

Having good relations with people is a natural happiness driver. You may start out in conditions where you don’t like the people around you. You might not have a great family and you might not have great friends early on. But the world is a very big place so you can always be seeking out new people. You can talk to a new person every day or several new people every day, online, and if you keep talking to people you’ll eventually find someone who gets you. And when you find people who get you, who bring out the best in you, see the best in you, then you’ll want to pass it on.

For me, a lot of my motivation is that I enjoyed books and songs so much, they gave me this religious feeling – this beautiful feeling of participating in something greater than myself. Communion, right, being with others. Even with authors who are long dead. Just feeling those feelings makes me want to give back. I’ve drunk from that well of human consciousness and I want to give back. I want to inspire some other kid to do better. That’s part of why I make these videos. It might not be for everyone, that’s fine. The world is a big place. 

If you’re not happy, I wouldn’t worry too much about trying to be happy, because that’s kind of a losing game. Instead try to ask yourself what it would take to earn your self-respect. Who do you respect, and why? What do you respect about the people that you respect? Think about the people in your life, think about public figures that you think you like. Don’t get too invested because public figures tend to have a habit of disappointing us eventually, but even so you know people are complex – you don’t need to idolize someone in their entirety to realize that there’s something good about them.

I recently learned that Marilyn Manson was an abusive partner to his partners which is horrifying and unforgivable. It’s just terrible. At the same time, there are a couple of riffs that he said many years ago that I appreciate.When he was interviewed about the Columbine shootings and people asked him what he’d say to those kids, he said something like, “I wouldn’t say anything to them. I would listen to them, which is what nobody did.” He’s right about that. And he’s also an abusive piece of shit. People are complex, and I don’t have to pedestalize Manson to take away one good thing that he did or said, and apply that in my own life and try to be a better person.

I’m not here to judge people. We are each on a journey in life – each one of us is born, we die, we have that dash in between, which is the path that we walk – and along the way we bump into other people, we learn about the journeys that people have taken long before us, we get the sense of people’s journeys after us, we read about history, learn about cycles, grand narratives, the rise and fall of empires, nations, just all kinds of grand shit happening – progress of technology and science and humanity – what’s your place in all of that, right? You don’t need to necessarily have a grand role in the grand scheme of things, but you can just be a nourishing force for good. You can just take care of yourself. If you do nothing else but to unlearn your own coercion and your own self-hatred you that you might have inherited right from other people – from your family or from broader culture – if you can unlearn that stuff, and you can be a good person to other people, by your definition, whatever you think is respectful and admirable in a person… you can earn your own respect. You can earn your own admiration. You can conduct yourself with what you think is decency and goodness. And then you do that. You prioritize that. And you keep at it. 

Slowly, the self-doubt, the negative kind of hateful self-doubt will start to wither away, your disdain for existence, potentially, will wither away. I read the news. I know that there’s terrible shit happening all the time. In my Google Keep, I have photos of victims of horrible things, to remind myself that there’s terrible stuff happening in the world, and that I want to contribute to the efforts that make the world a safer and kinder place for those people. Kids, you know, who’ve been through horrible shit.

But also like, you ought to be strategic about it. Because you’re not going to save the world overnight, or in your lifetime. It’s a team effort and it’s an infinite game. So you have to pace yourself. I get DMs from kids all the time and I often find there’s this strain of overdramatic thinking, catastrophic thinking. Like, “Oh, the world is terrible and going to hell and I can’t do anything about it therefore I’m miserable and I will never be happy.”

Like, okay, that might be true in some sense, but what power do you have as an individual, right? And what are you doing with that power? Are you doing what you can to make the space that you are in and around you– your own inner space and your own inner your thoughts, your mind, your beliefs, the interactions that you have with the people around you – are you choosing the best people that you can? 

Because, if you’re gonna have that extreme kind of thinking which is, “The world is going to hell, I can’t do anything, and therefore I’m not gonna do anything, I’m helpless”… I have to be gentle about this: there’s a kind of narcissism in that. There’s a kind of selfishness in that. Which is that, if things don’t go perfectly your way, you’re gonna just give up. It’s okay to grieve, it’s okay to be upset. Once you face reality, the cool thing is, eventually the shock wears off and then you are left with reality which you can confront, and you can do something about. You can change your decisions, you can do something differently, you can act differently. You can make plans, you can follow up on them, you can coordinate, you can build relationships with other people. You might not be able to change the outcome of a national election, but what about a local election? If you care about politics. If you don’t care about politics, what about just building a community of people who care about what you care about, and treating them with kindness so that they have a space that they turn to to soothe themselves? To let go of their anger and hatred so that they can be nourishing presences in their own life? 

There’s this quote from someone I mentioned in a different video as well: What does the world need most of all? The world needs people who have come alive. And so you have to come alive. And when you are alive, and you are a fluid expression of whatever it is that you believe, whatever it is that you love, then you won’t even bother asking questions like “Am I happy?” 

Like, I am me, I am the way I am, and there’s no worry or anxiety. I mean you will have small worries and small anxieties about day-to-day life – there’s this piece of work that I’m shipping, the writing on it’s not that great. I made a mistake here, or I promised someone something and I can’t get it to them on time, like those little worries. You will feel some worry and whatever but it doesn’t get into like the depths of your soul. There can be an invincible light there, an invincible summer, a kind of clarity. A sense of what your purpose is, what your priorities are.

Deep belly laughter, and an excitement for something. A childlike joy, and yet an adult’s measured ability to process what’s going on. If you don’t feel like that’s you right now that’s fine i wasn’t like that i you know it took me many years to get to something that is a resemblance of that and you know maybe 10 years from now i’ll look back at this guy making this video and be like what the fuck is that guy saying, he’s a child, he doesn’t know anything. Maybe. We’ll see. But I feel pretty good about where I am in my life right now. I think in the past few years I have become much more of a nourishing presence, for myself and for the people around me. And I make these videos to share that with people who are interested. Thanks for the question, ask me more questions if you like, and thanks for hanging out. Done.