Happiness in Practice
Everything can be taken away from you. Even your own mind and obviously your life but at that point it does not matter anyway. Some things though are harder to take away from you then others. When it comes to happiness, life has taught me that it is much better to generate your happiness from things that common events cannot easily take away. Happiness generated from things that can be more easily taken away from you is what I call “in memory happiness.” Do you generate most of or all of your happiness from your girlfriend or boyfriend? Then what happens to your happiness when he or she leaves you? Do you generate most of your happiness from being on the a football team? Then what happens to your happiness when you cannot play anymore?
In memory happiness can come from relationships (platonic or sexual), political preferences, popularity, athletic ability and much more. The common denominator between these categories is that they come and go, and some just go to never return. Death and time are very good at taking things from us, so in my estimation it is very risky to play this game called life, where happiness is the goal for most, by trying to maximize in memory happiness alone.
Well if most things in life can be taken away at a moments notice, and they are quite frequently, how can I build lasting happiness. Well clearly the answer is build up your “durable happiness” which is the happiness that cannot be so easily taken away from you. From my experiences and observations durable happiness comes from within. It is much harder for happiness that comes from within to be taken away from you. If you get happy from helping others then there is an unlimited amount of ways to do so, it would be really hard to take away all of your avenues to help people. If you get happy from writing and thinking of great ideas to put in your writings then even if you are 90 years old and have lost all your fingers there are still ways to write.
Durable happiness is sometimes hard earned but always long lasting. I try to add multiple sources of durable happiness into my life which is harder than adding multiple sources of in memory happiness. The more durable happiness you cultivate the more you protect yourself from absolute misery. I made the graph below to help explain my point of view on this.

Life is complex and simple, if you lived long enough or been outside enough you know what I mean by this. I did not write this to give life advice or suggest how you should live your life, I simply wanted to put some of the thoughts I have on happiness out there on the internet to maybe help a few people out and have a more popping twitter account. There are many edge cases (like depression) and heuristics to handle them, that I have formed from these ideas and others that I do not care to explain right now, but my hope is that for the few people who do read this it can help to formulate ideas and practices that create a more robust happiness for themselves.
