Lasting happiness comes from your understanding of what has the greatest value, how it is obtained, and the degree to which your actions reconcile to it. It comes from your ideas about how life works, how well those ideas align with reality, and how well your actions and desires reconcile with those ideas.
Your ideas about how life works are your beliefs. Beliefs differ between people and even in the same person over time and circumstance:
- Not all beliefs can produce the same degree of happiness.
- Not all beliefs are equally correct.
- Not all beliefs describe equal amounts of reality.
- Not all beliefs produce the same depth of meaning.
What you value, what you believe, and what you do will dictate how fully you are able to improve in life. Each of these three aspects of your choices will affect the others, and any friction between them caused by conflicts will impede your ability to improve, and therefore your joy. Joy flows at its greatest when what you believe, what you desire, and what you do are aligned.
Before joy can flow, action must be oriented towards its source. Joy comes from value. Maximal joy requires you to identify, find the path to, and do what is necessary to obtain what has the greatest value.
Before your joy can be full, your actions must be fully aligned with your desire and beliefs, and your desire and beliefs must be oriented to what is actually most valuable. How will you find it?