#becoming happy

[neo-shitty]

✍️.

[ingravinoveritas]

"We've all got to be fighting that fight every day."

Happy Pride, everyone...

[chloesimaginationthings]

Man this scene in FNAF 2 movie is gonna be wild-

[bixels]

The final TF2 issue really got to me. Spoilers, but it’s the reveal that all of this suffering and murder and war over gravel and shitty land was for nothing but senseless, bottomless hatred. That the administrator can’t even remember where this revenge plot started as she flashes through different false memories of her parents’ deaths. There was never a tragic backstory or justification, only terrible people doing despicable things. And despite how crass and stupid and unserious TF2 is, the story subverts every expectation by showing the survivors and inheritors willingly breaking the cycle. Ms. Pauling lies to the administrator and chooses not to save her, and finally lets her die. (Hurts even more if you read into the subtext that Ms. Pauling is in love with the administrator.) She lets the final cache of Australium go and walks away from the burden and legacy of a century-old bloodfeud. Hale lets Gray’s daughter go and live her life freely. Spy is the first to arrive at Scout’s house and meet his big family, finally takes off his mask, and helps with the kids. Even Merasmus exhaustedly makes peace with himself and Soldier and chooses not to curse him or something. There’s nothing to finish, no promises to keep, and no one to avenge. The only thing to do is break the cycle and walk away.

It feels odd how happy and warm everything is, but it feels so right and earned. These bloodthirsty, awful, violent men were expendable cogs in a machine of endless violence, and they found a way out. It’s a genuinely great message about letting go the past that burdens you and finding the will and a way to hit the bricks, change, and be happy. Maybe they don’t technically deserve happiness, but they’ve got it nonetheless, and they’re not gonna let it go to waste. They’re still all crazy and violent, but on their own terms now and with people who love them! Smiles.

[me-beef]

@strangeravatar made a great point

i was gonna focus on the spike-hotboxing-celestia aspect but i got distracted somewhere along the way and i think i forgot what joke i was trying to make

but dont you think its interesting how many guards of the exact same color/body type she's managed to accrue?? i do

ooohh you want to go look at our stickers so bad

[naturecalls111]

me n my vamp bf

[weinersnarf]

Yorha android Miku, aka 39B

This drawing is the singular reason I have failed inktober. HOW could I concentrate on anything but this?? She has consumed me I fear

(Yes her sword is a leek version of Virtuous Contract. YES she is standing on a pile of leeks. YES I felt the leeks were too important to only mention in the tags.)

[crystallized-anxiety]

Hi OP!!

1. Yes I'm really happy!!

2. Many things make me happy 🫶 some make me happy for a short period of time, and some help me build long term happiness that stays all the time (y'know the kind of happiness that is still there when nothing is happening? That one)

I am going to put things under the cut for the list so you can have ideas! I'm rooting for you!

3. Idk... I wouldn't change anything, I think? I mean, I have ongoing goals/ things I want to do that will improve my life or that will bring me joy when I accomplish them and/or while I accomplish them, but it's not stuff I want to change about my life, per se. Maybe I don't understand your question very well, sorry!

Detailed answer under the cut!

Categorizing things helps me a lot, so here is a chart that summarized types of happy things for me

One axis is for how happy a thing will make me.

Long term rewards means stuff that will create happiness constantly and/or will contribute to my baseline happiness. However, these types of things often require more work, a continuous investment of time and effort, and it takes time before they start producing happiness. Good examples (for me) include: finding meaning in my day job, helping my community, create and nurture long-lasting friendships, etc.

Instant gratification is for stuff that will bring me joy instantly. Obviously this is a scale, but you do have things that bring very quick gratification. These things usually take less time/ effort to achieve, but usually do not contribute baseline happiness. Good examples (for me) include: drinking good quality coffee, watching a comfort movie/ show, getting my blankets out to a nice spot on a clear night to watch the stars, etc.

On the other axis you have the process of how that thing will make me happy. It's easier to think of this axis as "remove" vs "add".

A good example is :

Removing dirty dishes from my kitchen (by cleaning, throwing, whatever) will contribute to my happiness and overall wellbeing. It's on the removal side. It's removing something that made me actively less happy.

Adding decorations for a festive occasion I celebrate in my home will contribute to my happiness. It is on the adding side. It's adding an extra something or other that actively makes me more happy.

The whole trick of this quadrant is that things move on both axes, all the time. For example, today, cleaning my apartment is on the "Removes irritant+ Instant gratification" quadrant. Because it takes little to no effort for me to vacuum my apartment.

There is also an equation to keep in mind when walking along the horizontal axis of this graph:

Back when I was in deep, deep depression, the same action was in the "removes irritant+ long term reward" quadrant. I had no energy, my life was in shambles. Vacuuming my apartment needed to be planned because, while it was necessary, I sometimes had to choose between cleaning and eating and cleaning simply could not win every time.

Keep in mind that there is no moral judgement on this chart. No type of happiness is "worth" more than another. As in all things, you need balance : you cannot feasibly work exclusively on long-term gratification stuff, but you need some happiness NOW to keep you running and fuel your life etc.

And of course what you can do with your energy levels / spoons needs to be taken into account!! This is all just a very short post on a complex topic and obviously needs to be tailored to your specific situation etc etc. I'm just hoping it'll offer a starting point to help you find your path to joy.

Joy = (joy added by your actions, long term or short term) - (dissatisfaction/misery generated by various irritants and painful things in your life)

So sometimes, no matter how much "adding" you do, you cannot remain happy because the bad stuff is ALWAYS there and ALWAYS sucking out joy. It's time to remove irritants!!

Some irritants, how to remove them is obvious: trash makes bad smell, bad smell at some point becomes unbearable, must take out trash to access joy again.

Some irritants, how to remove them is much less obvious : this person in my life is bringing me a lot of pain but I cannot bear to part with them right because [I have nowhere to go/ they have nowhere to go/ I will be all alone if they leave/ other painful reason]. At some point the pain this person brings into my life is too much and I can no longer feel happy.

In this second case, it's obviously much harder to "solve" the irritant situation. If you are in such a case, there are many great resources online to help you and it is not the object of this post. Back when I was in a very abusive situation with nowhere to go for over a decade, what helped me a lot was compartmentalizing. The people I was with were awful, but I focused on small bursts of instant joy, and by compartmentalizing my life to the extreme, I made it through.

This is not advice. Again, such complex situations are not the object of this post, but I just want to illustrate that it can be done. You can find a tiny bit of joy even in the face of The Horrors, and that tiny bit of joy will help you hang on until you vanquish The Horrors and then you will be able to build a life of love and happiness. I promise.

Now to give you a tip. A little secret sauce, if you will. There is a trick that can turn almost anything on the "instant gratification" part of this quadrant into something that has the same effect on your baseline happiness as a "long term reward item", but without adding in extra effort.

It is a trick that takes a long time to master, that's the catch.

It's going to sound super phony, but it's gratitude. I know, I know, I sound like a shitty self-help book, but you gotta understand. Sometimes times are hard. Even in a very happy life, sad things out of your control can (and most probably will) happen. Illness, death, personal or national tragedies.... Such is the nature of life.

And it will be hard. Even for very well-adjusted people, it's really hard.

So what you need to do is practice your gratitude in advance, so that when times are hard it's already there and it can feed you a little bit of joy.

Think of gratitude as a post-happy procedure. Let's say I've done an "instant gratification" action, like drink a very good cup of coffee. I will capture the warm glow of the coffee in my memory and put it in a little "for later" jar. I will try to preserve it.

And when things are rough because I'm out of a job, strapped for cash, etc etc, I will take out the little jar, and smell the memory of the coffee scent, and feel the glow and think "man, that cup of coffee was so good. Little things really can bring joy and life can be good. So it can get good again. I just need to get through this bit. It'll be ok"

The tricky part in this to both do it genuinely and to not taint the memory. Let me explain:

Doing it genuinely:

I need you to understand that you are not supposed to go through life being miserable all the time. Gratitude does not mean pretending you're ok and saying "I just need to get through this bad week" every single week forever. Good weeks should be the norm.

So looking at a happy memory in time of hardship should be done in such a way that it does bring a spark of joy, no matter how small. This will be achieved differently for everyone, and it's hard to put in place!!! I know I went through a big period of "fake it till you make it" because things were just awful. At the time something that helped me was writing down the happy stuff so that I could look back on when things were bad. Writing letters to "sad future me" was important because at the time, when I was sad, my brain forgot what joy ever felt like and every single happy memory before simply was deleted from my brain. I also had letters from friends and loved ones with very kind things on them to remind me of love and joy and things like that.

Not tainting the memory:

At the beginning gratitude is super hard because even if you manage to capture the moment and everything, when you bring it out in a time of need, it can turn you bitter. Instead of thinking "that was really nice, things will be nice again :) ", your brain might instead go "that was really nice, and now it's gone, and it will never be the same, and I will be miserable forever". This is not a failure on your part, it's just genuinely hard to practice this. So you gotta practice it when things are good to Pavlov your brain into doing it automatically when things are bad!!!

It's hard to do!! I know it is!! But I swear it can be done. I love you and I believe in you.

Okay, now for the list of things that make me happy daily!!!

- Stargazing when the night is clear. I make a whole show of it. I bring out a blanket on a specific spot, I put on specific music, I make a HUGE deal of it because making a huge deal of small good things is how I get maximum joy from small good things.

- My friends, my Beloved, and all the relationships I have in my life right now. I have a wall of pictures of the people I love. I took each picture at a random moment where I told them I loved them, and I captured their face at that moment. And that's how I have a wall of pictures of people whose eyes sparkle and whose smile is full of joy because they love me too.

- Video games!! I love playing video games and again, I make a big show of it every time. I do a specific set up with my plushies, I announce it to my cat, and I do maximum coziness

- Reading, too, same as above.

- Creating and general, so writing and art etc etc

- Planning things I like. Let's suppose I want to eat a specific dish next week, a dish that I love very much. I will choose a day where I can take the time to cook the dish, and I will write it on my fridge calendar with a small note "eating favorite dish!!! Yay!!" And I will be giddy and happy about it every time I see my calendar.

It's very late here and I need to go back to sleep (originally I woke up to go to the bathroom), but the gist of it is really to romanticize my life. You ever watch a Ghibli movie, like Kiki's delivery service, and see how colourful and joyous it is, and think "man, I wish I could live like that." ? Well you can!! I promise!!

I put up piano music and waltz in my kitchen while I make coffee every morning. I became friends with my local baker and so when I go get some fresh bread I ask him how his daughter is dealing with highschool! I spend a lot of time at the pharmacy every month because I take a lot of meds, so I also became friends with the pharmacist nearest to me, so much so that I sent her pictures of my cat after I adopted him!

Sometimes things seem insanely bleak. I know they do, I've been there.... But I promise you, you can build a life that will bring you more joy than you could have ever imagined

Hey guys, this is a bit of a weird request but can you guys answer these and reblog so I get more answers, please?

1. Are you happy right now as you read this?

2. What makes you happy?

3. If you could change anything to make you happier what would it be?

[lucereadp]

there's something very wrong with him

[erabu-san]

I enjoyed every second of this quest

[This art has platonic intention. Thank you for not tag ship!]

[lupinflowrs]

silco finds the letter (also family nap time bc. i said so)

[bluegiragi]

puppy playtime!!

early access + nsfw on patreon

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF stickers for next month,,

[smollkittykat]

I kind of don't like how a lot of people forget that despite all the angst and the drama around Dean and Cas they are fundamentaly best friends.

How many times did Dean say it throught the entire show? Bobby in season 6 saying "Well, you just lost the best friend you ever had."

For Bobby to say that, knowing Dean better than even Sam in some regards, how many times had Dean been sitting with Castiel on the couch in his living room?

Cas doesn't sleep, and rarely does Dean, with the Apocalypse looming right behind him.

So all they had left, in those quiet nights were each other. And they were okay with it, because they liked each other's company.

[mischievous-thunder]

Various variants

[reineydraws]

i regularly think about mishanks immediately post luffy becoming pirate king and this is one of the fluffier ideas haha

also kind of the spiritual successor to my very first mishanks post :'))