“I hope everybody could get rich and famous and will have everything they ever dreamed of, so they will know that it’s not the answer.” – Jim Carrey

I agree with Carrey, first hand. While I have obviously never seen fame or wealth to the degree that he did – I have seen them both to a tiny but significant enough degree to realize that beyond a point, they are both dead ends for happiness, for me at least.

I saw minor fame back in 2012-2014, the consequences of which I have already shared with you.

I have also seen some degree of financial freedom, fairly recently. While I am extremely grateful for the opportunities it has opened up for me and would never want it to go away until I live, guess what, I have realized even that hasn’t brought me sustained happiness. It has only brought in a sense of relief to some degree, that’s all.

To be clear, I am NOT saying that you should not pursue fame or wealth, they both have their benefits too, especially if you are reasonably wise and not overly obsessed, but sustained happiness is not one of them.

Why is that? Why is it that when you get, even to some degree the very things you wanted, after a while, they stop affecting you the way they did?

The answer to this lies in neuroscience.

Let’s switch from philosophy to some hard facts grounded in neuroscience and psychology, based on the knowledge we have in 2024. This is of course further simplified for a broad audience.

Now, a person’s wellbeing ultimately has a lot to do with their brain’s neurochemistry.

What does this mean? Every animal’s brain produces certain chemicals, also known as neurotransmitters that have a huge influence on their moods.

Some of these chemicals are dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphin, cortisol, norepinephrine and so on. There are many more neurotransmitters, but the point of this book is not to teach you everything about neuroscience but to help you understand the basic facts you need to know in order to live a better life. So, we are only going to focus on four.

Dopamine – Primarily your pleasure hormone

Oxytocin – Primarily your “love” hormone

Serotonin – Primarily your “relaxation hormone”

Endorphin – Primarily a hormone that helps you feel better after pain

Whatever you are feeling at ANY specific moment is more or less a result of interaction and balance between a variety of these neurotransmitters, WITHIN your brain.

While fame and wealth could give you initial happiness because it releases the “pleasurable” hormones. After a while, your brain stops secreting them and what used to be able to create these pleasure hormones subsides and you are back to your normal levels again.

This is why you keep trying to chase bigger and bigger highs, thinking that will finally solve the problem of happiness. The problem is seemingly solved, but only for a while. Eventually what used to be “WOW” becomes the new normal and fails to produce an effect, unless you try to push things further. Clearly this is a race that has no end.

In a way it’s your body’s way of resetting itself, because too much of a good thing for too long can be a bad thing and the body already knows it. If you still don’t believe me, in a particular study, rats given constant access to cocaine eventually ended up killing themselves trying to seek constant pleasure.

Your ability to cope with this brutal world depends A LOT on an ideal balance between these neurotransmitters in your brain. If they go out of balance for too long, that can wreak absolute havoc on your mental health and subsequently your well-being, no matter how much philosophy you read.

While there are ways to boost these neurotransmitters through medicines, particularly if you have a specific illness, that is out of the realm of my advice.

I am only going to focus on ways on the known, natural ways to regulate these neurotransmitters.

Of course, it has been simplified for a lay reader, the functions are a lot more complex than just what’s been mentioned below!

Dopamine – Increases when you have certain kinds of foods, listen to music you enjoy or anything you have “fun” doing. Also increases when you pursue targets you enjoy pursuing.

Oxytocin – Usually increases when establish a bond with someone you love or like. Also increases when you see something cute, like a little puppy.

Serotonin – Makes you “calm, at peace and at ease.” Any activities that relax you and calm you down, whether it is meditation, reading a relaxing book (probably not this one), having a relaxing bath and so on.

Endorphin – Primarily increase in response to pain, but that doesn’t mean you should chop your hands off. Moderate exercise is usually a much safer alternative.

Here is the reason I am sharing this with you. Philosophy is a great thing, but it cannot bypass biology. Sometimes no matter how well you know something intellectually, it won’t make you feel better.

No matter how smart we pretend to be, fundamentally we are still animals controlled by nature. So, it is important to work with nature, not against it. Remember Wu-Wei?

So, to retain your sanity in this brutal world, here are a few key points you need to remember.

• Keep Switching it Up

Even the work that interests you the most can get boring if done in the same routine like monotonous way every single day.  Even the work that you hate can become interesting if you figure out ways to make it interesting and randomize things. The truth is that no matter how productive people say that routines are, no one will deny that after a while they get boring as hell.

When you do something new that interests you, your brain secretes dopamine, a neurotransmitter which gives you the feeling of being excited and happy. When you do the same thing again and again and again in the same way, it can be the most interesting thing in the world but it slowly starts becoming less exciting.

Luckily you can trick the mind by doing the same thing in a different way.

Suppose you are a writer who wishes to write a book. In the beginning you are excited as you start but soon creativity goes down and you feel like you are stuck in a rut. What do you do then? Maybe you can write when you feel like it, maybe you can do the write at a different time of the day, maybe you can go out and get ideas by observing the environment around you.

Maybe you can decide to write whatever the heck you want to write one day and then remove the nonsensical portions when you feel like it. When you mix things up, things become exciting to the brain and “hard work” becomes a lot easier.

You can also “bounce” between projects when one tires you out or bores you too much and then come back to the original later, when the second one begins to bore you.

I do this myself. To hell with “discipline, focus, persistence, perseverance and rigid schedules” that give me a mental break down. Benny Franklin, I reject your way, I am happier with the way of Wu-Wei.

2) – Frequent small pleasures make you feel better in the long run compared to large infrequent pleasures.

Why? Suppose you have a hugely joyous unexpected event. You feel exhilarated and amazed, nothing like this has ever happened to you so far. It’s the absolute best experience of your life so far. The rush you felt was unexplainable.

Now consider this, let’s say nothing like this ever happens again in your life. Your life goes back to absolutely normal once again after a while. You will forever be hoping for something like this to happen again, because that gave you a massive dopamine rush for a while, only to never happen again. But because it doesn’t happen again, you will be frustrated and upset, and perhaps perpetually stuck in the past.

Consider the other situation, you don’t receive such a huge joyous event ever, but somehow, at regular or at least relatively frequent intervals, you keep getting a events or circumstances that make you relatively happy. You never got the huge dopamine rush, but over the course of your life, the second instance is going to maintain the dopamine balance in your brain and consequently your well-being much better, in the long run since it happens over a long period of time.

In even simpler terms, a diet of 1500 calories a day for a week, is healthier and feels better overall than a single meal of 20,000 calories.

• Happiness is relative, not absolute.

A multi-millionaire founder facing the wrath of investors every single day who threaten to kick him out, will be unhappier than a clerk who feels they are in control of their environment.

A person who earns a million dollars a year but lives in an area where everyone is a billionaire WILL BE MISERABLE, because to him or her, she will be the poorest of the bunch and knowing human nature, it is also possible that even someone earning a million dollars a year could feel insecure or actually be treated with disrespect in such a neighbourhood.

Someone who earns less but lives in an area where everyone he/she is at least at par with everyone else, if not better, will have a BETTER sense of well-being compared to the multi-millionaire who is constantly trying to feel accepted in the bigger boys’ club.

It’s a popular saying of today that “your network is your net worth”, which implies, the richer your network, the richer your personal wealth will be.

But I will repeat it again – sometimes your net worth is inversely proportional to your network, because in the very race to create the illusion that you are “equal” to or better than everyone you are hanging around, you may make some massive, rash career and financial decisions, that then destroy whatever good you had already.

 One thing is for sure though, even if your financial net worth is sometimes proportional to your network, beyond a certain “ideal” point, your mental net worth is almost always inversely proportional to it.

“We are happy in proportion as our range of vision, our sphere of work, our points of contact with the world, are restricted and circumscribed. That is why the blind are not so unhappy as we might be inclined to suppose, otherwise there would not be that gentle and almost serene expression of peace in their faces.” – Arthur Schopenhauer