I often hear about healing retreats, products, and techniques aimed at people who are supposedly broken, injured, or otherwise imperfect and incomplete—think self-forgiveness or mindfulness. I won’t be the person who tells you, “No, no, no, you’re perfect! You don’t need that.” Instead I will be one who says “Yes, please, asap, therapy, 100 sessions, it’s a matter of life and death, if not for you, then do it for everyone else.” Just kidding.
Instead, I’ll suggest that the reason you—or anyone—might feel imperfect, incomplete, and in need of healing is that we live in an imperfect world that keeps breaking us. It’s like living in a metaphorical house on fire, while psychologists ask, “How do you feel about your house being on fire?” or “Let’s talk about your childhood and your relationship with your parents.”
Yes, we often feel like we need healing before we can move forward. But here’s my take: it’s not our fault. Healing something that will just break again is a waste of time and money, as it is likely to just break again. A far more efficient approach is to address the structural issues that create the need for healing in the first place or, on a personal level, to learn how to survive and thrive in any environment you find yourself in.
Furthermore, paraphrasing Martin Seligman, who famously argued that “curing the negatives does not produce the positives,” we need to understand that simply healing negative emotions is not enough. Instead, we must actively cultivate what makes us happy in the first place to truly live a happy and complete life.
I’m talking about cultivating unconditional happiness—the kind that automatically resolves life’s problems, making healing unnecessary. It’s like being in a house on fire but never getting burned despite the flames. Sure, it would be ideal if there were no fire in the first place, but our society is, in many ways, broken and beyond immediate fixing. So while we can’t fix society overnight, we can fix ourselves.
This is exactly the point I make in my first book, Optimal Happiness, where I teach people how to be happy regardless of their circumstances—whether it’s the language they speak, the place they live, or the color of their skin.
I’m also in the process of writing a second book, where I explore how to fix society as a whole—to make it perfect and automatically conducive to maximum happiness, a world where we would never need healing. (Stay tuned.)
Still, while utopia remains a distant fantasy, and healing is great, it’s even better to be automatically happy—almost like a James Bond-level agent who can get out of any situation and thrive in it—to be happy today and forever. And that’s exactly what we teach here.
Stay happy <3
