Life Is Too Short To Spend Unhappy

 "Be grateful, or at least have context, for your prison"

- Greg Burton

I've set a daily reminder for 1:45pm that says "Life Is Too Short To Spend Unhappy". I set this reminder in my calendar on October 23, 2023 and scheduled it for about 5 weeks. This experiment is part of a broader goal of mine that I set in October to be more happy, or more specifically, to be less frustrated. My daily emotional inventories in October showed that I was spending a lot of days upset and consequently, less happy. The reason behind my anger isn't as important as how I tried to change my emotional state. 

I know I said the reasoning behind my frustration is irrelevant, but the source is what, in part, has led me to write today. I'll start with why I picked 1:45pm. By mid-October, I was 8 weeks into a 29-week accounting program and I was finding daily frustrations. These daily frustrations often occurred in the minutes leading up to my first accounting class at 12:30pm, putting me in a bad mood for class. After a 75-minute class, there is a 15-minute break that starts at 1:45pm, which I figured would be a great opportunity to reset my mind emotionally for the second class of the day.

Why do I believe that life is too short to spend unhappy? Here's my logic:

1. If I spend the entire day unhappy with my current situation, I will spend the next 20-odd weeks unhappy.
2. It's likely that this thing annoying me will probably exist anywhere I work, and if I continue to spend each day frustrated, I will likely spend the next 20 years unhappy.
3. Each time I receive this notification, I'm left with the decision of how I want to spend the rest of my life.

The result was exactly what I hoped for. I found myself letting go of whatever frustration I had and enjoying and focusing on the moment. A daily reminder to appreciate the reasons for where I'm at makes every day wonderful and isolated frustration uses much less of my mental/emotional energy.

I've heard a lot of different definitions, maybe a hundred different ones, on what is means to be happy, to have joy, etc. I've heard many people try to describe joy as a longer lasting version of happiness and that joy is a more fulfilling version of short-term happiness. I see joy more as a verb and happy as an emotion. "I'm enjoying this movie." "I'm happy right now." And I don't see them as competitors. The distinction I would make is the difference between happiness and satisfaction. Satisfaction being a more fundamental emotion over the course of someone's life.

What I'm trying to connect are happiness and a positive attitude. I believe happiness follows a positive attitude more often than not in the same way that happiness follows a smile. It's the human ability to manipulate our own emotional state. But how do we have a positive attitude? I propose gratitude.

Gratitude --> Positive attitude --> Happiness. So, what is my advice? Be grateful!