Member-only story
The Second Key to Happiness
The second key to happiness is to know what is enough.
Stop compensating your past
When we start learning about ourselves, we start to know why we do certain things and why we have certain desires. Honestly, you may find that they’re mostly to compensate certain lack in ourselves.
Say you are the least intelligent among your competitive siblings, so you work harder and earn more money until you are richer and more successful than your brothers and sisters to compensate the lost in competitions when growing up. Say you have a critical mother, so you work harder and become so successful or pretty or whatever until you are way superior than your mum. I know a guy who was motivated to earn big bucks just to prove his insensitive teacher wrong. Basic overcompensation mentality.
Over the years you became exhausted and also unclear about why you worked so hard and are still not happy. So you start searching, asking why you have been motivated to do what you do, then you discover some Youtube channel and psychology article which point you to familiar childhood pain.
But the first key to happiness (if you haven’t read the article, here), is to stop defining yourself. Once you start digging, you will get addicted.
