101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

partner, a better job, some more money, recognition for your
work, see it and accept it, even if you think society says it
means you’re shallow or broken or don’t “love yourself”
enough.
03. If you can’t figure out what you really want, look straight at
your deepest fears. What’s on the other side of them? That’s
what you want.
04. Be grateful for your discomfort. The sad and weird thing is
that happy people are complacent. Feeling uncomfortable is
the signal that you’re on the precipice of something new and
better, but you must take action.
05. Your new best friends will be structure and productivity. It’s
not about checking off a 100-point task list; it’s about knowing
that you accomplished something (anything!) that contributes
to your well-being each day.
06. “Irrational anxiety” is usually cured by doing very practical
things. The nonsensical things you worry about are usually
aggrandized projections of real concerns that you’re not
dealing with.

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07. You must start where you are, you must use what you have,
and you must do what you can. Anything else is running away
from your problems and abandoning your life and yourself.
Real change is a product of evolution; thinking otherwise is
an illusion that will keep you separated from the very stuff you
need to heal.
08. Make a conscious effort to connect and reconnect with the
people you already have in your life—even if it’s just one
person you trust and connect with. This will begin to re-form
healthy emotional attachments. It’s not weak to need love.
09. Buy a notebook that is exclusively for junk journaling, which is
what you’re going to do whenever you feel pretzeled up
inside. Write down whatever comes out—whatever
gruesome, awful, self-hating, embarrassing thoughts come
up, let them out. Once you do this a few times, you’ll believe
me when I say this will release them.
10. The only thing you should ever try to do when you’re very
anxious or panicked is to comfort yourself. You cannot think
clearly and shouldn’t make assumptions or decisions about
your life in that state. Figure out what soothes you (a snack, a
bath, talking to someone, doing something you really enjoy)
and get yourself out that energy before you do anything else.
11. You will need to figure out how to live in the moment, even if
that seems boring, impossible, terrifying, or all three. Anxiety
is the warning sign that we’re too much in the past or the
future—and being there is affecting how we make choices in
the present.
12. You will need to take action on the things that are holding you
back from pursuing the things you actually want. As Cheryl
Strayed says, “Real change happens on the level of the
gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than they
did before.”
13. Read. If you don’t read, it’s not because you don’t like
reading; it’s because you haven’t picked up anything that
interests you. What you read now will affect the person you’re

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going to be for decades to come. Read articles and essays
online about how people cope with their fears—in it you will
find camaraderie, how many strangers feel just as you do.
Read about things you don’t understand, that scare you and
fascinate you. Just read, damnit.
14. You can change how you feel. This is something you must
remember. It’s as simple as: “I want to feel differently about
this, so I am going to focus on a different aspect of it.”
15. If you want to buy into the idea that you cannot “choose”
happiness or how you feel or what you think, you are
condemning yourself to an extremely hard life and should
stop reading now, because doing those things is the only way
to save yourself.
16. You will always have anxiety. You will always feel fear. If you
give a damn about your life, or if you’re even playing the
slightest bit of attention to what’s going on here, you’ll know
there’s a lot to be anxious and afraid of. The end goal is not to
eliminate those feelings, but to strengthen the mental muscle
that will allow you to choose to be happy in spite of them, not
become paralyzed when they’re present. That’s all.
17. For some people, strengthening that muscle will require a
simple shift of perspective. For others, it will be years of
medication and therapy and more work and effort than
they’ve ever put into anything before. It is the fight of all our
lives and the thing we most owe to ourselves. If you’re going
to pick a battle, pick this one.
18. The problem is not the problem. The problem is how you
think about the problem. Your internal guidance system is
sounding off right now because something isn’t right. This
doesn’t mean you’re barreling toward a life of perpetual,
inescapable suffering. It means somewhere deep down, you
know there’s another way—a better way—to live. It means
you know what you want, even if you’re scared of it.
19. You need to choose love. This sounds like annoying advice,
but you cannot give up on the people who light you up inside,

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on the things you love to do (even if they aren’t work) on what
you want for yourself. You must choose love even if it scares
you. (In fact, your fear about doing something is proportionate
to your love for it.)
20. You must learn how to express pain when you feel it. This
does not mean you can justify reckless, unchecked behavior;
it means you need to learn how to acknowledge your pain,
communicate it clearly to others, and deal with it as it comes
up.
21. You must learn how to unravel whatever emotional toxicity is
built up inside you. For example: If you don’t let yourself feel
and accept that you were hurt badly by your ex, you will
constantly be projecting ideas about how your new fling will
hurt you and how you shouldn’t even try, thus recreating the
situation you’re most afraid of. The unraveling is seeing,
feeling, and accepting. Life is sometimes brutal and unfair
and unspeakably horrendous. ("We are all in the gutter, but
some of us are looking at the stars." —Oscar Wilde)
22. Separate sensations in your body from what you think they
mean. When you’re seriously upset, ask yourself, what do I
actually feel in my body right now? Like, what do I actually
feel? Chances are it’s nothing more than just a little tension or
discomfort. The rest of your panic is everything you’ve
chalked that sensation up to mean.
23. Don’t trust all of your feelings. Conventional wisdom says to,
but that’s insane considering how many of those feelings
stem from irrational thoughts and past experiences and so
on. If you blindly trust all of your feelings, you will be thrown
around by them constantly. Decide which ones mean
something and which don’t.
24. Utilize the most powerful growing tool of all: “future-self work.”
If you’re on the fence about kids, imagine your life at 75. Do
you want your own family around you, or are you okay on
your own? Imagine your life in three years from now. Will you
be happy you didn’t try harder in that relationship, or that you

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didn’t save any money, or that you wasted your time watching
Netflix when you could have been writing the book or starting
the business or playing music like you really want to? Imagine
your life from the perspective of the person you hope to be. It
will place many things back into alignment.

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100
STOP CHASING 
HAPPINESS
Alan Watts taught that the desire for security and the feeling of
insecurity are one in the same—that “to hold your breath is to lose
your breath.” Traditional Zen Buddhism would agree: To desire
fulfillment is to not have fulfillment, happiness is not something you
seek, but that which you become.
These ideas are nice (albeit likely just platitudes for most people),
but they illustrate the madness behind the common wisdom of
“chasing happiness.” As Andrew Weil has said: The idea that human
beings should be constantly happy is “a uniquely modern, uniquely
American, uniquely destructive idea.”
It is our desire for perpetual happiness that drives consumerism,
eases the fact that we’re all barreling toward uncertain death, and
keeps us hungering for more. In many ways, it—alongside our
existential fear of death and suffering—accounts for why we’ve
innovated and developed the society we live in. Our lack of fulfillment
has driven us because the quest for happiness does not and will not
cease.
This is largely due to hedonic adaptation, which is really just the
fact that human beings get used to what happens to them. We
change, we adjust, we adapt, we crave more. Psychologists also call
it the “baseline,” the way in which we regulate ourselves to come
back to “neutral” after different life events occur.
Chasing happiness is trying to keep ourselves sustained by
“positive” life events, rather than adjusting the baseline as a whole.
Motivating ourselves with the hope of achieving a sustained feeling
of “good” is not only unhealthy, it’s impossible.
If you want to be happy, you need to stop chasing happiness.
Happiness is a byproduct of doing things that are challenging,
meaningful, beautiful, and worthwhile.
It is wiser to spend a life chasing knowledge, or the ability to think
clearly and with more dimension, than it is to just chase what “feels

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good.” It is wiser to chase the kind of discomfort that only comes with
doing something so profound and life-altering that you are knocked
off your orbit. It is wiser to tip the scales over rather than balance
things you don’t like only because you believe balance will make you
“happy.” It is wiser to do things that are hard and make you feel
vulnerable and raw than it is to avoid them because comfort makes
you feel temporarily, fleetingly good.
At the end of the day, to avoid pain is to avoid happiness. (They are
opposite forces within the same function.) To numb ourselves to one
side of our feeling capacity is to shut down everything. It leaves us
chasing the kind of empty happiness that never really fills us and
leaves us shells of the people we are really destined to be.

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101
WHAT YOU