Happiness exists
How good is your life? Most often the answer is: “about seven out of ten.” Rarely higher. You can’t have it too good. So something’s slipping away, there’s a catch somewhere.
Those remaining three points aren’t emptiness — they’re space reserved for problems. And this zone doesn’t tolerate a vacuum. When there are no real difficulties, it fills up with the next item on the list. Yesterday’s trivialities inflate, demand solutions — and it all starts over.
What we call happiness turns out to be a brief spike on the joy graph: achieved something, bought something, moved somewhere… After a while, the mind returns to its habitual mild discomfort. Because when things are too good — that’s even unsettling.
Buddhism identifies three roots of suffering: ignorance, attachment, and aversion. I’d reduce them to two.
The first is ignorance. Not stupidity, but a kind of blindness. It prevents you from seeing that problems, suffering, and all negativity are merely settings that can be changed.
The second is fear. It disguises itself as caution, prudence, “a sensible outlook.” Living too well — impossible, you’ll have to pay for it.
But it’s not a protector — it’s a parasite. It feeds on energy, replaying “what if something goes wrong” scenarios in your head. Freediving is great because it peels you off this “spacesuit” — and you notice how the whole mechanism works.
You don’t need to chase spikes or seek happiness outside yourself. The task is to raise your baseline — the level below which your state never drops. A good life is one that glows from within.
How to achieve this? Reduce the amount of suffering. Stop generating negativity.
Everything that hurts — we produce ourselves. The first arrow is what happened. The second is your reaction. Don’t drive the second arrow into yourself. Nothing will change from it — it’ll only hurt more.
Sustainable happiness isn’t a fleeting emotion you need to catch. It’s a state that arrives on its own when nothing is blocking it. It’s always there, just obscured: by fear — you’re afraid something bad might happen, and by ignorance — you don’t see that none of it is real.
Suffering doesn’t protect you. It only consumes resources. If you stop believing in it and replaying it — nothing will happen.
Next time you catch yourself thinking “what if something goes wrong,” ask: what would I do if I weren’t afraid? The answer is real life, and the door to it opens from the inside.