Today, AI wrote something I don’t agree with, repeating a common misconception or feeling: that success and happiness are personal, almost as if there are 8 billion definitions of happiness—one for each person on the planet. But this just isn’t the case. Sure, people want t-shirts of different colors, to drive different cars, to have different family sizes, and to put different amounts of sugar in their coffee, but these are specifics.
On a global level, we all want the same things, as our happiness is guided by our psychology and biology, which are 99.99% the same for most people in the world. As such, environment, education, and personal circumstances do play a role in what we ultimately say we want. However, on a deeper level, we all follow the same one happiness formula, which takes into consideration all 8 billion individual expressions of happiness. I call this the Optimal Happiness formula.
This Optimal Happiness formula is important because most people are suffering unnecessarily. They follow incomplete, erroneous, and limited happiness formulas, which promote the limited view of happiness, like that happiness is personal and not universal. However, most people don’t understand happiness, as they look for it in all the wrong places, they suffer, and repeat the same mistakes.
Furthermore, what we think of as unique personalities may not even be real. Buddhists have said for centuries that our personalities are fabricated by societies and reinforced by speech and marketing. Ultimately, we can experience a state of non-self, which might sound far-fetched or New Age to our brainwashed social view. But this non-self isn’t theoretical—it can be experienced. I’ve experienced it several times in my life, and many others have too. It is a state of complete nirvana or happiness, where we know for certain that the self isn’t real, and all the suffering tied to the sense of self stops. In turn, most suffering is connected to the sense of self, because if you remove the self, there is no one left to suffer.
Furthermore, spirituality is a pillar of happiness, which exists in every part of the world in one form or another. It has a strong effect on our sense of well-being. Here, you don’t even have to believe in Buddhism to recognize its truth, as most religions in the world have a similar concept or experience, although they may call them by different names. And even if you don’t believe in any religion or spirituality, you can still experience the non-self.
It is almost like experiencing a sonic boom when passing the speed of sound. You don’t have to believe in it for it to exist. Its existence is undeniable and relevant to most of us, whether it is relevant to us personally or not. It’s not a matter of belief—it’s a matter of fact. The same applies to the Buddhist idea of non-self and the Optimal Happiness formula: these are real concepts, ones that we can learn to experience and enjoy in our daily lives.
To learn more about happiness, the idea of non-self, and how we can maximize (optimize) happiness in our lives, I invite you to get more familiar with this website.
