This Is The Key To My Happiness

It’s simple: Not caring.

You come home from a long day of work.

It was a very stressful day and you long for the comfort of your couch.

You step outside your car and walk to your front door when you notice that you’ve got mail.

Knowing it can be nothing good you open up the letters and find Bills, one more expensive than the other.

The thoughts begin racing in your head:

How are you going to pay for all of this? What are you going to do? Why is this so expensive? Where can you save? You need a raise at work but for that you have to work even harder and that’s too stressful already!

Your stress level shoots through the roof. You are not happy.

It’s this kind of stress that most of us deal with every day.

And it all comes from caring too much!

We care about how they are perceived by others, that they always feel a certain thing, and that everything goes according to their plan.

We want everything to work out for them, be perfect in every way, have all the luck in the world and only feel those juicy, positive emotions.

But what if you just didn’t care about all of that?

What if you didn’t care how others perceive you and just acted out what you wanted?

What if you didn’t care that you always felt positive but accepted your emotions for what they were?

What if you didn’t care about any plans and took what happened as it happened?

What if you didn’t care for your life to be anything other than what it is? What if you could just say “Oh well?”

Happiness boils down to accepting yourself, your situation and everything about you.

It’s our Resistance to life, ourselves and our emotions that makes everything stressful and bad!

We have these ideas of perfection; of the emotions we should feel and those we should not feel, of the personality traits that are good and those that are bad and of what things are good to do in life and the things that aren’t.

Everyone has these expectations and these rules they hold themselves to without having any idea why.

True happiness happens when we step outside this cage that we created.

When we can cry openly, with all our heart, without hiding it from anyone or trying to justify it.

When we can be ourselves, even if that means getting dozens of weird looks as we laugh and goof around every place we go.

All of this happens when you can look at everything around you and everything inside, say “Oh well!” and move on!

And when we can look in the mirror and feel proud of who we are without any judgement or need for being better.

All of this happens when you stop caring about the rules of the world, the rules you set yourself and the rules of other people and when you’re just accepting of your life as a whole.

Originally published at http://quora.com.