HealthyGamerGG - Why Does Today's World Make You So Unhappy?

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Happiness feels like it's becoming increasingly rare. Why is that? In today's video, we explore the reasons we are unhappy and how to steal back joy. Learn more from Dr. K in his Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/3NUguZj Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The world that we live in sucks, and every day it appears to be getting worse. And as the world gets worse and worse, it becomes harder and harder to live in it, which means that people are becoming increasingly unhappy. Before we get into what the nature of happiness is, I want to take a second to tell y'all where I'm coming from. So, hi, I'm Dr. Kay. I spent about seven years studying to become a monk and then ended up becoming a psychiatrist. So my perspectives that I'm sharing with y'all today are essentially a combination.

of those two things. If y'all are interested in more resources on depression or whatever else you're looking for, there's a ton of stuff on our YouTube channel, we have a Discord server, and then we also have things like Dr. Kay's Guide to Depression, and we recently launched YouTube memberships where people can sort of make requests for more in-depth lectures. If y'all are interested, check out the links in the description below. So our impression is that the reason that we're unhappy is because of all of these events going around outside of us.

And I'll be the first to admit that, like, stuff is bad out there, right? You can look at even very simple statistics. Like, the average U.S. home price prior to the pandemic was $290,000, with an interest rate of around 3%. A mere three years later, the average home price is $420,000 with an average interest rate of like 6 to 7%. So that means that a mere three or four years ago, you needed to make $70,000. $26,000 a year in order to buy a home. Now, you need to make $127,000 to be able to afford a house. This is crazy. This is just a four-year span. So there is no question that things are objectively harder. The problem is that as things become objectively harder, we start to surrender our

happiness to those circumstances. We don't realize that if I want to be happy today, yeah, the world can suck, but I actually have some component or some degree of control or agency and how happy I am despite the circumstances. Now, you may say, Dr. K, that's a load of BS, right? The reason I'm unhappy is because the world sucks. And the moment we start believing that, we surrender our happiness to the state of the world. So just think about what you're doing there for a second, okay? If you're saying that in order for me to be happy, I need the world to be back to where it was in the 1960s, which by the way, that was like the epic generation, right?

So to be born in the 50s, have unprecedented economic growth from World War II, be alive in the 60s and 70s when everyone's fucking doing LSD and then not requiring like any kind of college degree or anything like slip into a job with like minimal effort. And then like there's an unprecedented level of economic growth. you retire in the 90s with a full-up pension and then you're just chilling. Like, that's epic. If the world is an epic place and everything is easy, then everyone gets to be happy. The problem is that if you assume that the world has to be fixed in order for you to be happy, you are trusting whoever is in power or macroeconomic events to essentially determine whether you're happy or not.

That ain't going to work. We don't want to trust them. It's those people out there who made the world what it is today. they're the ones who screwed it up. And we do not want to trust our happiness to them. So we're going to learn how to take it back. So you may be skeptical, but let's understand that even in a shared circumstance that everyone is dealing with, there is a variability of happiness. So I think the best example of this is actually Victor Frankel in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

So what Victor Frankel discovered is that everyone's in a concentration camp and it sucks for everybody. And yet, I can discover some degree of happiness or peace in spite of my circumstances. And we also know this from a ton of literature on trauma and things like that, where you can have populations that go through genocide. Like there's actually an attempt at genocide. And not everyone ends up with PTSD, right? There is something that we can do as human beings to alter the way that we feel in spite of our circumstances. Now, this is a skill that I think has been lost to a certain degree.

And the generation before us didn't need it, right? So the better the world is, the less good we need to be at like finding happiness and stealing happiness out of the world because the world is pretty chilling. Now what's started to change is as the world has gotten worse, we need to train ourselves in our mind. We need a level of skills. We need to adapt to our current environment in order to be happier. So how do we do that?

Let's start by understanding what the nature of happiness is. So I'll give you all like a simple example, right? So people will say that comparison is the thief of joy. And that's somewhat true, right? So let's say that I'm like going out there and like I make myself a sandwich. And that sandwich is really good. And then I go to lunch with my coworkers and I'm eating my delicious sandwich. But next to me, there's someone who has a remapre an even more delicious sandwich.

And their sandwich has a better bread and it's got this homemade like garlic. aoli instead of mayonnaise, right? Which is basically the same thing with a little bit of garlic powder. I don't even know what that stuff is, but they have like the fancy version of the ingredients. And so suddenly the sandwich that I used to be enjoying, I'm enjoying less because that person out there has a better sandwich. And we sort of know that this is true, especially with things like social media. The thing about social media is that it encourages us to compare.

I had five people like my post, but that person over there gets 20 people liking their post. And therefore, I used to be really happy, but this person has it better than me, so then I feel less joyful. Now, if only comparison was the thief of joy, and you may be wondering, what do you mean by that? Didn't you just say that comparison is the thief of joy? No, no, it's not the thief of joy. It is simply one of the thousands of thieves of joy that exist in our society today, because there's all kinds of other things that steal away our joy. And if we really want to understand how to steal it back, we have to understand the nature of joy. Okay? So now I'll give you all like, let's run through a couple of other examples. So let's say I'm eating a burger. Okay. So if I eat a hamburger, where does the joy of the hamburger come from? So if I'm sitting there and I'm eating the burger and if I'm kind of just eating it, right, like it can be pretty fun. But what happens to the joy of eating a burger if I'm watching some kind of TV? What happens if I'm eating a burger in my mind is worried and stressed about like the test that I'm

I have tomorrow or whether my boyfriend or girlfriend is going to break up with me. And so the first thing that we can sort of understand is that the joy doesn't come from the burger itself. There is some layer of personal involvement, let's call it that for now. We'll define what it is. That determines my happiness from the burger. So I'll give you all like a simple example, right? So let's say I eat the burger.

And then like I start to think to myself, man, I should have had a salad. And then I start to feel guilty. And then even though the burger tastes really good and I wanted to eat the burger. suddenly something has happened within me that now I feel guilty, now I'm thinking I should have eaten this other thing, and then my joy from the burger has somehow reduced. So let's take a look at another example. Let's say that we're going to the bathroom. And the key thing to understand is that when we go to the bathroom, what is the one thing that we fear more than anything else? The inability to take our phone with us, right? So let's understand what happens if you go to the bathroom without your phone.

You get bored. So let's understand, like, we try to avoid boredom at all costs, right? That's why we've got this. I don't know about y'all, but I'm the kind of person who, like, listens to an audiobook while I'm doing my dishes. And the second I'm done with my audiobook, I'm turning on the TV. And the second I'm done turning off the TV, I'm back to the audiobook or now I'm listening to a podcast. So our mind is constantly occupied. And what we consider boredom, what is the nature of boredom, is that I have all these kinds of random thoughts that don't have a focus.

So when I become bored, if you really stop and think about it, the amount of thinking that I'm doing actually increases. And even if you look at comparison, right? So if I'm comparing, I'm sitting there enjoying my sandwich and what happens the moment I start to compare? Literally, what is comparison within you? It is an addition of thought. So we start adding on a layer of thought of like, I'm enjoying my sandwich and then suddenly like now I'm comparing to this person. Now I'm thinking about this person. I'm thinking this. I'm thinking this. And if we sort of think about even enjoying the burger, right? So if I'm enjoying the burger, I don't know if y'all can tell, but I must be hungry. green. It's almost lunchtime. So as I'm enjoying the burger, if I'm distracted by something,

the more thoughts that I add to the equation, the less I enjoy my experience. And boredom is unregulated abundance of thoughts, right? So now we're starting to see a pattern, which is the more that I'm thinking, the more unhappy I am. Now, let's kind of take the flip side of it. Right? So if we reduce our thoughts, does it make us happier? And if we look at all of the activities that people love, what do all of these things do? Let's start with substances of abuse, alcohol, marijuana. Like, what do these things do? Oh, my God, I'm so anxious. I'm worried about this. I'm worried about this. The world is going to hell. Let me get high. Let me get drunk. And then what happens to our thoughts? Our thoughts slow down, right? We reduce the number of thoughts that we have. We're able to just think about one thing. So you have these profound revelations of like thinking when you're high, right? And so let's look at other things, healthier versions of this. So now we come to mindfulness. So everyone is like, oh my God, like we need to do mindfulness practices.

Oh my God, like I'm going to do this mindfully. Like mindful, mindful, mindful, mindful. But if we really look at mindfulness, mindfulness isn't about mindfulness. It's actually about mind emptiness. The purpose of mindfulness is not to have your mind full. It's literally to empty your mind. So as we, before we sit down to meditate, for example, our mind is filled with thoughts. And as we focus on our breath or as we chant a mantra or as we engage in some kind of mindfulness practice,

what we are literally doing is reducing the amount of thoughts in our mind. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget. From luxury to family rides, CarMax has options for almost every price range, including over 25,000 cars under $25,000. Want to get started?

Head to CarMax.com for details and get prequalified today. Want to drive? CarMax. And it's not just these things. This is where also you can look at psychopathology, okay? So if we look at psychiatry, we have a lot of medications that never cure an illness. And what do all of these medications share? What do they all do? They all have one very fundamental mechanism of action, which is that they numb and slow down the mind. Okay. So if we look at something like SSRIs, which are serotonergic medications, what they essentially do is emotionally numb us.

Side effects of SSRIs include emotional numbness and sedation, right? So if we have someone who is thinking too much, let's say they're depressed, and what is it? What is it? what's happening in the mind of a depressed person, they're constantly thinking about how bad they are. What is happening in the mind of an anxious person? So we know that one of the features of anxiety is something called rumination, which is when you think about the same thing over and over and over and over again. And what is our treatment for that? We're going to give you a medication that will slow down your thoughts and numb that crap out. But it's not just the SSRIs. We also have people with schizophrenia or psychosis, and we give them antipsychotic medications, side effects and

include sedation. And what does this literally do? It slows down the activity in some parts of our brain. So if we're doing things like hallucinating and thinking all these like negative delusional thoughts, those literally get numbed out, but they make us kind of numbed out and sedated. Ah, but Dr. K, what about other medications like benzodiazepines? So this is another treatment for anxiety, which is basically like alcohol in a pill form, works on the same receptors, the gab receptors of the brain. And what does this do? It kind of chills us out. It kind of works like alcohol. We start thinking less, right? We cut back on the rumination. Ah, but Dr. K, those three things are all sedating, but what about stimulant medication? In ADHD, the medication that we give wakes people up.

It's a stimulant. Ha ha, it doesn't slow us down. Once again, incorrect. What do we stimulate with ADHD medication? We stimulate our frontal lobes. What do our frontal lobes do? They control and act as breaks and slow down the other parts of the mind. If you look at someone who has ADHD, their mind is moving in a thousand different directions. How is it that a stimulant allows them to literally slow down, which is what it does? Because it increases the strength of the brakes. It shuts off a lot of thinking. So our whole system of psychopharmacology in psychiatry is all about slowing down thinking of the mind. And what we've discovered, and this is what's really cool, what we've discovered is whether we slow down the mind in depression, it

improves depression, it improves anxiety, it improves ADHD, it improves psychosis. All of our mental pathologies are enhanced by slowing down the mind. This is also why meditation and mindfulness is an evidence-based treatment for every single mental illness out there. It works for depression, it works for anxiety, it works for ADHD, works for schizophrenia. Right. So how does that work? It's because meditation slows down the mind. So now we're going to kind of sum up things up. Because if you understand this principle, if you understand the nature of happiness in the mind, you will able to be happy in today's world in spite of the circumstances. So if we look at all of the things that we dislike, boredom, increased activity of the mind,

right? Comparison is the thief of joy. I'm enjoying something and then thoughts start coming in. Depression. It means hyperthinking about myself. Comparisons in social media, shatter my joy. Anxiety is rumination about a particular problem. The more we increase mental activity, the more unhappy we become. Let's look at our antidotes. How do we end up being happy in today's world? We're going to get drunk. We're going to get high. We're going to binge watch something. And so if you really stop and think about it, let's say I'm eating a burger and I'm watching a TV show. What's happening in my mind? I disappear for an hour, right? I want to get caught up in something. I want to watch a TV show that makes me stop thinking. I really want it because when we binge watch

You know, that really good thing. It's like, oh, my God, like I'm not thinking about anything else, right? I'm just focused on the show. I want a show that makes me forget everything else. Same with video games, same with pornography, right? So when we watch pornography, like, we stop thinking about everything else. So even our psychiatric medications and mindfulness, they all work on the same mechanism, which is to slow down the thinking of the mind.

Hey, just a quick note. A lot of people will ask us, what do I do next? And that's why we built Dr. Kay's Guide. It's a comprehensive resource that distills over two. 20 years of my experience, both as a monk and as a psychiatrist. And it's designed in a way that's tailored to fit your needs. So if you're interested in better understanding your mind and taking control of your life, check out the link below.

And so how do we use this information to steal back joy in today's world? So I want you all to start by just thinking a little bit about your own life, right? So take the moments of your life, and I recommend that you'll do this over like a 24-hour period. Look at the moments in your life where you are more joyful, where you are happier and more content. What is happening in your mind? Is there are there a ton of thoughts? Are there very few thoughts? Is they're thinking only about one thing?

This is another reason, by the way, why orgasm is so enjoyable, because orgasm is a physiologically induced, no mind state. The second the orgasm is over, you start thinking, oh, my God, was it good for them? Was it good for them or not? Oh, my God, oh, my God. And right before orgasm, you may be thinking, oh, my God, are they enjoying it? are they enjoying it, but that moment of orgasm, it all disappears. So I want y'all to start by just paying attention to what are the moments of joy in your life and what are the moments of

unhappiness in your life. And what I really want you to pay attention to is the level of mental activity going on in your mind. The next thing to consider is what level of control do you have around how the world enters you? Okay. So we think that I am unhappy because my circumstances are bad. And if we take like the example of me, for example, like so I have a really, I'm lucky, right? So I have a lot of stuff going for me. I'm blessed to have a wonderful wife. I've got kids. I've got a stable income. Like, I'm so lucky in so many ways. Therefore, I must be happy, right? But if you actually stop and think about it, my experience was that the happiness came first. I went to India and I learned this principle. When I had failed out of college, when I had no money, when I was 26 years old, I had a

5 GPA, no prospects, no income, nothing. And yet I was content because I understood this principle. I understood that the circumstances in my life touch me in some way. This is the key thing to understand. There's all kinds of crap going on outside in the world. But as that stuff touches you, it enters your mind. And the moment it enters your mind, the moment it enters your being, you have some degree of control over how you receive it, right? And this is the tricky thing. Some of y'all may say, okay, but like, what's the degree? Is it 1%? Can you modify things by 10%? Can you modify things by 59%? What amount of your happiness is determined by your circumstances and what amount of happiness is determined by the way you receive things? Now, I'm not going to give you

all a clear answer. This is something I want y'all to figure out. I'm very confident in what the answer is, too. And I think you know what the answer is too, but I want y'all to play around with it, right? So what I want you all to do is first notice how active is my mind when I'm happy and how inactive is my mind when I'm unhappy. So look at those two things. The next thing that I want you all to try to do is to try to notice that, okay, if the less activity in my mind correlates with happiness, then literally all I need to do is reduce the activity of my mind.

So when I receive some kind of bad news, what will sort of notice if you receive bad news, what happens in your mind? your mind starts looping, oh my God, this is going to happen, this is going to happen, this is going to happen, this is going to happen, this is going to happen, this is going to happen, right? This is literally what happens. And I know that sounds kind of weird, but like even in that moment where this bad news has hit you, let's say you got dumped, if you can slow down the activity of your mind, literally the happiness returns. This is why we binge watch stuff and get drunk after a breakup because it slows down the activities of our mind. And now we get to the really weird thing, which is that the happiness that you feel, you view as, as you view as, a chronic state, right? My life is bad, therefore I am chronically unhappy. But if you really

look at your life, what you'll see is that there's fluctuations. It goes up and down throughout the day. Even if your life is the same, the level of unhappiesness that you literally experience from moment to moment as you live your day fluctuates. Now, this is a really important revelation. Because what this means is that if we can find what those high points are and we can expand them by slowing down our mind, oh my God, I just got dumped or oh my God, this thing is happening. Let me meditate for a few minutes. Let me take a deep breath. Let me just enjoy this sandwich. Let me be focused on this one thing. I have to eat anyway, but thinking about my problems doesn't actually solve anything. So let me just enjoy the sandwich. And as you all practice this,

and you can literally practice meditation, that's the best way to sort of train this skill. It doesn't matter what kind of meditation you do. But the most important thing is observation. As you practice this, you will discover something really, really fascinating. And this is where people get really, really tripped up. Everyone thinks, if someone's life is good, that's why they're happy. But the truth is that it goes the other way. As you become content and happier in your day-to-day life, despite your circumstances, the instrument that you use to improve your life becomes way stronger.

right? So when I get dumped, what is the best frame of mind to actually healthily move out of that? If I'm anxious, if I'm depressed, if I'm catastrophizing, I can't actually improve my circumstances. And this is what I discovered in India is that when I started to become content with myself, when I started to accept myself, when I stopped ruminating all the time and having all these consuming thoughts that I had to self-medicate with binge, like playing video games for 20 hours a day, when I stopped having to do that crap, when I could accept who I was, when I could just exist in my own skin for a few hours, suddenly I can actually make progress to improve my life. So the happiness actually comes first. And if you can sort of discover that, even 1%, 10%, 50%, you will be, your mind will be free

of anxiety, free of depression. As your mind becomes free of those things, you can suddenly start actually making your life better. You can start acting in a forward momentum. And the problem is that right now the anxiety paralyzes you from even improving. So I know it sounds crazy. But I encourage you all to really look at this, right? Start to really think about what is it that accounts for the fluctuations in my happiness throughout the day.

And I'm giving you all a direction to look at, which is look at the activity of your mind. And then what you'll discover is that as I modify the activity of my mind, as I'm able to be present when I do a particular thing, I will find more joy in it. And as you find more joy and basic things, your mind will calm down. Your mind will fall into line. And then the beautiful thing is then you can leverage it, utilize it to actually fix something in the outside world. So we all think that the reason we're unhappy today is the world is going to shit. And we're not wrong in that sense, right? Like the world is going to shit.

And yet not everyone is equally unhappy. Some people have figured out how to be resilient, how to not let the ails of of the world bowl them over. And the problem is that in our society, this is a skill set that the generation before us did not ever need to train because their life was good. But as the world changes, we need to be Darwinian. We need to be like Darwin's Finches.

And we need to adapt by learning how to steal back happiness from a world that is trying very hard to take it away. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At first citizens bank, we're fit for your ambitions, whatever shape they may take. Whether you're planning for today or tomorrow, we've got the flexibility and know-how to help you reach your goals.

Because we're built for what you're building. First Citizens Bank, fit for your ambition. Learn more at firstcitizens.com slash ambition.