But until you've had a real lasting meaningful and abiding experience of a live piece or peaceful aliveness is which , which is what I call happiness . It's easy to mistake pleasure for happiness or lust for happiness or you know , the trappings of success for happiness . But none of those things last .
You should patent that . Um Yeah , I think , you know , a lot of us really do outsource our happiness to the world , to other people , to other things , to other places , events , experiences , and most of us eventually , if you live long enough , you begin to see through the illusion and the promise that the world and other people and other things unintentionally , um unwittingly make right to make this promise that they can make you happy . But if you live long enough , you see through that and you realize that the world can do nothing but break that promise over and over again .
Well , the greatest takeaway is that success doesn't lead to happiness , but happiness does lead to success . And so happiness is not only the greatest success , meaning it's the reason that we want to accomplish , achieve or acquire anything and everything in the world , but it's also it also leads to success , right . So it's the greatest success and it leads to success , meaning more traditional forms of success .
And so I would say that , you know , we all experience our lives individually , uniquely ourselves . And I would say that happiness is equally easy or difficult . Um For all of us , there's no um you know , nobody really gets a leg up in terms of happiness in this world .
You know , there's something we call the Hedonic treadmill , which is that essentially all of us as human beings adjust to even the best or the worst of circumstances and conditions . And so most of us , no matter what we achieve , accomplish or require or don't achieve , accomplished a choir , we end up basically defaulting back to our baseline level of happiness . So that's why for instance , people get married , they experience a little honeymoon period and then before you know , it , they're just as unhappy as they were before they got married and maybe sometimes even unhappier than they were before they got married .
