Happiness and duality caught my attention while reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Below is the book excerpt reproduced in my original post.
Archived Project Mindset post, originally published in 2022. Dates and roles reflect the original publication.
Happiness and duality
In The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness, I found this fascinating discussion of happiness. The following passage is translated from the German excerpt in the original post:
Today I think happiness is actually a default state. Happiness emerges when you let go of the feeling that something is missing from your life.
We are survival and reproduction machines that constantly judge. We go around thinking, “I need this” or “I need that”, caught in a web of desires. Happiness is the state in which nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind switches off and stops travelling into the past or future to regret or plan something.
In that absence of desire, you experience inner peace for a moment. With that peace, you feel content and happy. You are welcome to disagree. Again, it is different for everyone.
Some people mistakenly think happiness consists only of positive thoughts and activities. The more I have read, learned and experienced — checking what I read against experience — the more I have found that every positive thought contains a negative one. It contrasts with something negative.
The Daodejing expresses this more beautifully than I could, but ultimately it concerns duality and polarity. Saying I am happy implies that I have also been unhappy. Saying someone is attractive implies someone else is unattractive.
Every positive thought contains the seed of a negative one, and vice versa. This relates to how much that is wonderful in life comes through suffering. You need to recognise the negative before you can aim towards and appreciate the positive.
For me, happiness is not about positive thoughts, nor negative thoughts. It is the absence of desires, especially for things outside myself. With fewer desires, I can accept the current state more fully. My mind wanders less and stops moving towards the future or past.
— Passage from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, translated from the German excerpt reproduced in this archive
More in the Project Mindset archive (German) and the Reza Mehman Podcast.
