You're Happy And You Have The Lobotomy Scar To Prove It

Part un: How do I find the meaning of life and the reason I exist?

Damn it's a good thing you came here. I can seriously help you with that shit because I'm old and I know more than you do.  Now this will get a little convolute but I don't feel like making it any clearer because I've spent a long fucking time getting it narrowed down this far. So then.

Start by looking in the right place. Don't ask your dog, for example. Try to use some common sense here.  People who seem to have a lot of meaning and reason for their lives are a good place to start. The microwave is not.

'Reason' and 'meaning' are then formed from what is found in the combination of ones' favorite personal experiences of observable reality and ones' personal history of experienced reality with ones' favorite versions of other peoples' stories about their history of experienced reality.* Doesn't mean the result will be right, but you'll get a reason and a meaning you can understand.

Bear in mind that expecting the conclusion you arrive at to apply perfectly to everything all the time is like looking for a pair of shoes in a steak using a sweater. It won't. Why? Because at the same time you're engaged in this process, other people (although not nearly enough of them) are doing it too, which means that ideas and points of reference will shift. Things outside your sphere of perception and control are meanwhile continuously beginning, changing and ending. Bear in mind too that your ability to perceive is limited, and you will never achieve omnipresent omniscience, which even if you did, might not provide you with much of a 'reason' or 'meaning' anyway.

It's OK though. Here's what you do in the meantime:

Come up with an idea you like about meaning and reason and test it by attempting to use that idea to effect a specific outcome. If the test bears out your idea, then you adopt the result and use it as a tool to investigate more ideas. This is called 'having a life and living it'. If your idea works, then at this point, you experience 'belief' and 'certainty' and 'increased efficiency'.

If it doesn't work, then this is the point at which you experience 'doubt' and 'instability' and 'suckage'.

What do you do then?

You don't just continue to try and wham the original fucking idea into fitting the results....you come up with a new goddamn idea and see if that works.

It will not kill you.  In fact about 3/4 of the time you will experience the resulting paradigm shift as an enormous sense of relief. That 1/4 of the time you experience it as fucked up, when it destroys everything that came before and leaves you bereft of formerly familiar landmarks, is the point at which you get to make a very simple decision: build a new paradigm, or go back to the old one?

What do to?

Well...did the old one paradigm bite? Build a new one. All the phenomena you based the old one on is still there, you just have to recombine it and probably throw out a lot of stuff.  This is an important point.  Subtraction is a part of creation.

Did the old paradigm provide you with things that you believe to be important to you? Return to it.

All done? Good.

I know what you're saying. No seriously I do. Yes I do too. Which is why we'll tackle the issue of happiness next.

______________________

Part deux: Happiness - it's not just a city in China!

If you listened to your dog when you asked it about meaning and reason, then right now you're probably eating cat crap. Do you experience this as pleasant, fulfilling, relevant and survival-enhancing? Then you're happy, and you need to go sit over there and be happy.

If not, you're unhappy, and you still need to be sitting over there.

You do not fix unhappiness by telling yourself that you actually are happy, any more than you fill up your gas tank by telling yourself it's full. 
You certainly do not solve it by telling yourself that you should be happy. Why? Because 'should' doesn't put you at 'happy'. 'Should' puts you at 'still pre-happy'.
Nor do you fix it by making other people agree that you're happy and getting pissed off at them when they won't play along.
You fix it by deciding to be happy according to your own standards, as discovered by implementing the principles in part un, and then changing things around you until you are.

Start here:
The more fallacies you base your life around, the shittier your life will be. Thus it follows that if your life is shitty, what you believe-or are trying to believe- right now is REALLY STUPID.  Therefore:

Quit believing in stupid things. It makes you do stupid things. Doing stupid things makes you unhappy.

_________________________________

Part C: 'Qui Custodit Portam Asinum Caput Mouere Prius Habito'
Which is French for 'wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.'


People who deceive themselves are first of all aware of the stupidity of their data. In order to complete the operation they must then decide to continue to utilize it.
Stupidity is a state.
Self-deception is the decision to impose that state upon yourself. 

As such, it is usually painfully obvious to onlookers.  Those who lack the mental furniture to detect it are exactly the type of supporting cast that anyone looking to achieve happiness does not need, yet deserves, and will get.  Nothing attracts more stupid like stupid, as we observe in the case of the Insane Clown Posse.
Magnets: how do they work?
Muthafuckin' rainbows.

The decision to replace action and change with self-deception subsequently and invariably creates great deal of unpleasant suck. Where many people would say 'hey, this sucks' and stop doing it, the determinedly self-deceived generally refuse to abandon the use of lies, and attempt to lie their way around this suckage by erecting higher and more elaborate buttresses of lies, which effort feeds back into itself resulting in an ever-increasing rate of material and metaphysical entropic decay; or, as it is commonly known, a giant clusterfuck of stupid.

The by-now completely overwhelmed self-deceived will commonly react to this snowballing state of affairs not by abandoning their initial strategy, but by imposing a greater volume of self - induced stupidity....attempting to cover it all over like a cat shitting in a gravel driveway by using more lies combined with abreactive stress responses. And all the while, their fucked-up paradigm state steadily propagates as they continue to apply it to the people and things around them.
Get it? It propagates.
Your determination to be stupid and behave stupidly makes other people miserable to the direct degree of their involvement with you. Your determination to CONTINUE this behavior makes their lives worse exponentially right along with yours.


Got it?  Now QUIT BEING A FUCKING IDIOT.

_________________________________
*Wasn't that easy? You can stop paying for those e-meter sessions now!