This is a message for people with wounded hearts, who feel like they can never be happy.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably watching VAs as a form of basic self-care. That’s great! Keep it up, and hopefully you’re finding other modes of self-care as well.

In this message, I want to step back from that kind of day-to-day technique, and look at the big picture – the life-philosophy stuff about what it’s all for and what we want to do with our lives.

My Promise to You

This page contains absolutely no condescending, Pollyannaish optimistic BS about how everything will get better and it will all work out in the end if you just believe in yourself and follow your heart and (above all) wait for things to get better.

I spent long, lonely, miserable years trudging through every day with a heart so wounded it was hemorrhaging, with no hope of healing in sight. And the thing I hated above all was when someone told me that everything would be all right if I just kept on trudging.

That’s BS. You know it. I know it.

Let’s talk some real talk about how to be happy when our hearts are pulverized.

I’m not selling anything. I’m just a guy who lived for a very long time without hope, feeling like I could never be happy – like the wounds in my heart could never heal. And then I found things that helped me.

I just want to share what I found, in case it helps you, too.

This is just my two cents. Your mileage may vary. If what I’m saying seems wrong or unhelpful to you, I will be the first to tell you to disregard it and move on.

But at least I’m not offering you any condescending BS.

Before We Get to the Main Thing

One part of my story is that I kept reaching out for help until I found people who could help me. So, while I’m not going to say, “just keep on trudging until everything gets better,” I am saying: Keep on looking for people who can help you until you find them.

None of us can do this alone. That’s why I’m offering you this message. I couldn’t do it alone, and I know others can’t, either.

If you’ve got nobody, try me. But, really, nobody has nobody. Look around, and keep looking.

One other thing. For me – again, this is just my experience – finding help included getting professional help from a good therapist. It made a huge difference. I found that even with supportive friends who were helping me, there were some problems in my heart that I didn’t understand, and that my friends somehow couldn’t help me with, even though they wanted to and they tried their best. Just like doctors are trained to diagnose what’s wrong with you based on an extensive knowledge of what all the possible problems might be, counselors and therapists know the right questions to ask you to help you uncover insights about yourself that you (and your other support networks) might not be able to reach otherwise because you don’t have the same knowledge base about how these problems work. Not all counselors and therapists are good at it, so you may need to try a few before you find the one who helps you. And it’s important to realize that you need to do the work; the counselor or therapist is there to help you, but can’t do it for you. This is an option you might consider if you’ve gathered a support network for yourself and find that you’ve still got big troubles in your heart that you can’t seem to make progress with.

The Problem with Life

We all want to be happy. And the natural thing everyone thinks at first is that happiness is found in having the right life circumstances. We all start out thinking that we’d be happy if only we had X, Y or Z in our lives.

For some, it’s finding their true love. For others, it’s financial security. For others, it’s the approval of peers on social media. For others, it’s parental love. The list goes on.

The problem with life is that your life circumstances can never, ever, ever make you happy. That’s just not how happiness works.

We all have wounded hearts. And I know this will be hard to hear for some people, but: There is no set of life circumstances that is ever going to heal those wounds for you. We spend our lives chasing after the things we think will heal us – from true love to social-media approval – and we all just keep bleeding.

I spent years thinking that when I found my true love, she would heal my heart. That made me desperate, because when people feel like they can’t be happy without a certain thing, it makes them desperate. And – as with so, so many others – my own desperation for love made it impossible for other people to love me.

Then, against all odds, I found my true love. And I found out she couldn’t heal me. She doesn’t have a magic wand. She’s only human, like me. Don’t get me wrong! Her love and support mean the world to me. But she isn’t a miracle cure for my emotional problems.

I once saw an interview with Jim Carrey. He’s made a bunch of #1 movies that made him millions of dollars and millions of fans, and he’s also won prestigious acting awards and secured the respect of his profession. “I spent my life trying to get to the top of the ladder,” he said in the interview. “And now I’ve reached the top of the ladder. And I wish everyone else who’s out there trying to get to the top of the ladder could get up here with me, so you could all discover what I’ve discovered: that there is nothing up here. Nothing!”

I saw another interview where Tom Brady, one of the greatest NFL quarterbacks in history, said he wasn’t happy, and felt like the thing that would make him happy was missing from his life. “But you won seven Super Bowls!” said the astonished interviewer. “You live in a huge mansion. And you’re literally married to a supermodel! What more do you want?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

In my search for happiness, I have spent a lot of time studying the world’s wisdom traditions – Aristotle, Buddha, Moses, Confucius, all those guys. And there’s a lot I still don’t know. (The more I learn about Buddhism, the more I realize how much I don’t know about Buddhism.) But I have discovered something.

This point about life circumstances is the one thing all the wiseguys agree about. All of them are absolutely clear and firm about it. They blast it from loudspeakers and put it on big, flashing neon billboards. This is the starting point, the first thing that they all agree you have to get clear about before you can make progress.

There is nothing in the world around you that can make you happy.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t be happy! It just means you need to stop looking for it in the wrong places.

Tiana’s Path: The Way of Self Reliance

The world’s biggest wiseguys don’t agree about everything – not by a long shot. But as I have studied them, I think they do fall roughly into two camps. I call the first one the Way of Self Reliance.

Have you ever seen a Zen garden? Instead of trees and flowers, it has rocks and sand. While people can enjoy these gardens for different reasons, the original idea behind them – the actual Zen teaching – is that real-life stuff like trees and flowers will always frustrate and disappoint you. All kinds of things can go wrong with them, and in the end, they die. The point of a Zen garden is to cultivate within yourself a more permanent inner appreciation of beauty – the beauty that a real garden only displays temporarily. You learn to value the idea of beauty, which you can never lose, rather than an actual garden that has all kinds of problems and will inevitably die.

The Way of Self Reliance centers on detaching yourself from needing the things in the world around you, and instead, cultivating the resources for happiness within yourself, where you can never lose them. Focus on moral self-improvement and on appreciating the beauty of whatever is intrinsically good – not needing the things themselves, just appreciating the beauty they convey.

This is a difficult Way, because it involves giving up our feelings of need for things that we feel like we really do need. You must strive to care less and less whether you get the things you want in the world outside yourself. It isn’t fun. (And it can be taken too far – I’ll say something about that below.)

But you will discover over time that there is greater satisfaction in striving to become more and more the kind of person you ought to be, which is something you can never lose and that no one can ever take from you, than in striving to possess things in the world around you that feel like you need.

There are different views about this Way, and I don’t want to dismiss the differences. Buddhism itself contains many traditions, each with its own view (and as I’ve said, I don’t claim to understand them all). In ancient Rome there was an important school of philosophers called the Stoics; the Enchiridion of Epictetus is a very short and accessible introduction to their view of this Way, and continues to attract followers (including me, for a while). In the modern world, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s simple essay “Self Reliance” may be the most influential expression of this Way.

But the point in all these cases is that our unhappiness begins with having a false sense of need for things in the world outside ourselves. Rather than trying to balance and manage our desires for these things – to try to control how much we want them, and when and how we pursue them, in order to manipulate the world around us so we get more and more of what we want – we surrender our need for things outside ourselves entirely.

Think of Tiana and Naveen in Disney’s Princess and the Frog. Naveen thinks partying and living it up like a playboy will make him happy. So he wrecks his life, because he feels like he needs to live this way, like he really can’t live any other way.

Tiana thinks opening the restaurant her father always dreamed of will make her happy. So she can’t be a whole human person, because the burden of the work has become everything to her – she, too, feels like she needs the restaurant, and can’t live any other way. In the end, Dr. Facilier offers her the restaurant if she’ll give him the magic amulet he needs for his evil plans, and Tiana has to overcome her sense that she needs the restaurant – to realize that her father always had what he truly needed, regardless of his life circumstances.

Tiana thought she was self-reliant at first, because she was building her restaurant through her own hard work. But when she learns to “dig a little deeper” and understand herself, she discovers that she hasn’t been truly self-reliant, because she has been relying on the restaurant. And that dream had become an unbearable burden. She had invested her happiness in something that was beyond her control, something that would endlessly encumber and frustrate her, and that would in the end provide a lever inside her heart that an evil man could use to manipulate and control her – unless she recognizes that she doesn’t actually need it, that she already has all that she truly needs.

And notice that the thing Tiana has to give up needing is not a bad thing but a good thing. That’s why Tiana’s story is more interesting than Naveen’s. Giving up bad things only means you have ceased to be a fool. Giving up good things, for the right reason, means you are becoming a hero.

In the climactic confrontation with Dr. Facilier, she has to take the beautiful and noble dream of the restaurant and smash it to smithereens. That is the harsh discipline of the Way.

Moana’s Path: The Way of Higher Love

Yeah, yeah, okay, go ahead and get all your Steve Winwood jokes out. I’ll be here when you’re done.

Traditional Chinese gardens often include a small lake with one or more islands in the center. The islands have beautiful trees and plants on them, but they are inaccessible. We gaze at the beauty of the islands from across the water, and we love them. We can’t get to the islands, but we don’t need to. Seeing and loving is enough.

The cultural influences on Chinese gardens – like the culture of China itself – are extremely complex. But one of the important ideas behind this traditional practice is the Confucian idea of “heaven,” a transcendent realm of beauty and goodness that we cannot reach, but that we can in some ways perceive and enjoy. We can invite heaven into our lives by striving to do the things heaven wants us to do.

We strive to create beauty and goodness. Our efforts may fail. In fact, in the long run they certainly will fail. And we may not be cheered on or appreciated by others for our work to create beauty and goodness; we may be rejected and opposed for it.

We must accept all that from the beginning, because if we don’t we will only end with bitterness and disappointment.

We cannot reach the island. But that isn’t want matters.

What matters is seeing the higher beauty and goodness, loving it, and inviting it into our lives by living for its sake. We only find our true selves, the people we were really meant to be, when we abandon ourselves to the love and pursuit of a beauty and goodness that are higher than ourselves. When we care more about what happens to the beauty than about what happens to us.

We pursue happiness by devoting ourselves to doing good in the world – doing things that bring justice and mercy to the people around us – knowing full well that the world is so badly broken, our efforts cannot ultimately fix it.

Where the first path calls us to a radical detachment from the things of the world, in some ways the second path calls us to an even more radical attachment to them. The Way of Higher Love does not tell us to disconnect ourselves from the things in the world around us, but to connect ourselves to them in a completely new and different way.

Instead of surrendering our needs, we surrender our purposes. We will not stop loving the things around us, but we will love those things for the sake of the beauty and goodness they can embody or serve, rather than for the sake of how they can serve us and our own self-oriented desires and preferences.

This Way, like the first, is harsh. In some ways, it demands an even more complete surrender. I am not required to give up the things in the world around me, but I am required to give up valuing them for what they can do for me. I must want beauty and goodness more than I want my own self-oriented desires and preferences.

The only thing I am absolutely required to abandon is . . . myself.

But the teaching of the second Way is that by abandoning myself, I will find my true self. The “me” that I have to give up – the me that just wants to fall in love, or be financially secure, or get likes on Twitter – is not the real me. The “me” I must become, the me who loves beauty and goodness more than my own self-oriented desires and preferences, is the real me, the me I was always meant to be.

There are, again, various interpretations of this Way. Aristotle is in many ways similar to Confucius, but with important differences. The Persian mystic Zoroaster taught that our world is the battleground between two eternal gods, a good one and a bad one. Even though the war can never be won, because the bad god is as eternal as the good one, we must still fight for good, because it is good – because the good god is the one that deserves our allegiance. (We find something similar to that in Norse mythology. The good gods and heroes know they are destined to be defeated by the evil giants and trolls in the end, but they will fight with all their strength until the very last breath anyway.) Judaism speaks of tikkun olam, “healing the world,” not because our efforts can ever fully and finally fix a world ruined by evil, but because our small efforts at spreading justice and mercy to our neighbors are a way of surrendering ourselves to a higher power of love – a power that really is going to fully and finally fix the world, when the time comes.

But the point in all these cases is that to fight the good fight for justice and mercy is its own reward, whatever happens to us. Our happiness is in the struggle to do good, not in whether we win or lose, or what circumstances we live in as we struggle. We will not find the beauty and goodness in the world around us, but we can find them above us, and bring as much as we can of them into the world.

This is more or less the whole point of the original Wonder Woman movie. Diana thinks evil is confined to a few bad people under a specific bad influence, and that once this influence is removed, the world will be good. Then she discovers that evil is a persistent power in the human heart, and is disillusioned. For a time, she loses her sense of mission. Why save the world, when people are just no damn good and they don’t deserve it? And in the end, her answer is: because it is what love requires.

Or think of the climactic scene in Moana. Her quest has failed disastrously, her comrade has blamed her and abandoned her, and she is alone in the vast ocean. At first, she throws away her calling – the call that came to her from the ocean, to carry the burden of restoring the heart of the world. But then she is asked: “Do you know who you are?” And as she ponders that question, she discovers that “the call isn’t out there at all – it’s inside me.” And as she reclaims the burden of the quest that she had thrown away, she says that she does so because: “I am Moana!” Surrendering herself, she has found her true self.

What the Two Ways Have in Common

Now, if you’ve read this far, chances are you find at least one if not both of these two Ways intriguing. (I did say at the beginning that if you find nothing I say helpful, you should disregard it and move on!)

Your natural next question might be either “which Way do I think I should try following?” or possibly “are the two Ways contradictory, or can I sort of follow both?” But there’s something else I think is worth paying attention to before you start making those decisions.

The two Ways have some central things in common. And I think noticing that is far more important than choosing between the two Ways. Some of the most important stuff is actually the same in both cases.

That’s the stuff you’re going to have to do no matter what, if you have any interest in pursuing any of these things.

Both ways are hard because they begin with humility – with putting something else ahead of our own desire for worldly fulfillment.

Humility does not mean humiliation. It does not mean you shouldn’t be treated with human dignity and respect. It does mean you make a change to your priorities for your life.

I said before that all the wiseguys agree there is no set of life circumstances that is going to make us happy. I didn’t say why. The reason – again, they all agree about this, and they all think this is the most important thing – is because you can never be happy as long as the thing you care about most in the world is your own happiness.

This is the message of Inside Out – if the goal of your life is to be happy, you will destroy yourself.

This is the message of Coraline – if everyone in the world around you really did dote on you and give you everything you wanted, the way you wish they would, you would end up blind, freezing and imprisoned forever.

Tiana must break the amulet. Moana must surrender to the quest.

Nothing can make these acts anything less than agonizing. But the alternatives to humility don’t work. Humility works. (Of course it works. It didn’t get to be the central life recommendation of all the great sages and prophets of human history because it’s fun.)

This is really, really hard to take. I know it’s hard to take. But life is hard to take. And wounded hearts need strong medicine.

And you know what? If you’ll excuse me for being blunt: In my experience, it’s pretty much either this, or sinking ourselves back down into that soft, warm, repulsive slimepit of condescending, Pollyannaish optimistic BS about how you’ll be happy in the end if you just follow your heart.

We’ve tried the easy ways. They don’t work. It’s time to try the hard Ways.

One last word on this point – and once again, I have to ask you to excuse me for being blunt. Another thing that all the wiseguys agree on, and think immensely important, is that you must completely remove from your life any corrupting influences that prey on your desire for worldly happiness. Exactly what that means will be different for different people, so you will have to examine yourself to see what this might mean for you.

If you can scroll through Instagram and not feel ugly, that’s great. But if staring at influencers on Instagram is making you feel disgusted with your own body, stop staring at influencers on Instagram. There’s nothing wrong with a little indulgence purchase now and again. But if you tend to create a false sense of security or success in your life by spending money you don’t have, stop spending money you don’t have. If you’re in a social media group where people make you feel shamed and rejected if you don’t conform to their expectations, get out of that group and find people who will treat you with respect. And if you habitually make your pain go away by indulging your physical senses with junk, whether that’s drugs or drinking too much or unhealthy relationships or porn or binge eating or whatever, cut that shit out and find better things to comfort yourself with.

I’m sorry. But I’m being blunt about this because I’ve learned it by really hard experience, and so have a lot of people I know.

This is where getting help from other people can be essential. Including professional help if you need it. Whatever you need to do to get corrupting influences out of your life, let me urge you to do it. Don’t wait.

As much as we all want to, you cannot set up a little side compartment of your life where you indulge the old desires. Those corrupting influences don’t ever stay in the side compartment. They make you miserable, in ways that you won’t really see until you’ve quit them and gotten them out of your system. And they sap the strength in your heart that you will need to follow the Ways.

Quit cold turkey – today. It’ll hurt at first, and then . . . well, it’ll hurt some more. But after a while, it’ll stop hurting, and then you’ll be very glad you did it.

But When Does My Heart Get Healed?

This has been tough stuff, all about discipline and humility and sacrifice. So here’s a word about healing your heart.

If you have a physical wound, you can’t heal it directly. Your body needs to heal itself. You don’t glue the cut closed, you wait for your body to close the cut itself. A body that doesn’t heal its own wounds is dead.

But that doesn’t mean you do nothing. What you do, by washing the wound and putting bandages on it and things like that, is create the conditions under which your body can heal itself faster and more effectively. You can’t heal the wound, but you can make the healing quicker and better.

And above all, you have to avoid poking and pulling at the wound and re-opening it. Because no wound will heal if you keep messing with it. You have to put a covering over it and protect it from agitation while it heals.

Now, when we are focused on finding happiness in our life circumstances, what we are really doing is constantly re-opening the wounds in our hearts every day. Whether the thing we’re trusting in for our happiness is falling in love or social-media approval or financial security or whatever, the more we invest our emotional well-being in these fickle and fragile things, the more we keep ripping the wounds in our hearts back open.

Because these things – even when they are good things! – create frictions and frustrations in our lives. And that’s not so bad, if we haven’t set these things up as the only hope for our happiness. But if we have set these things up as the only hope for our happiness, the frictions and frustrations they create will constantly re-wound our hearts every day.

Following one or both of the two Ways is like washing and bandaging the wound in your heart. They don’t directly heal it. But they create the conditions under which healing is possible. Focusing your attention and your energies on something other than your own happiness is like putting a big bandage over your heart that says: “Do not disturb – healing in progress!”

I know that may be difficult to believe. I’ve found by experience that it works. And I haven’t found anything else that does. So . . . this is what I have to offer you.

My Two Cents about the Two Ways

I think it’s far more important for people to try one or the other – or both – of the two Ways than to advocate any particular opinion about which Way is better, or what else to think about them. That’s why, so far, I’ve tried to give both of them a fair hearing, presenting each of them with the best possible face. I want you to have the opportunity to make up your own mind about them.

But I do have some more definite opinions about them. In case you’re interested, here are some of my further thoughts. However, again, I’d much rather you tried this stuff in whatever way makes sense to you than for you to do exactly what I think is best.

And, again, this is just my two cents. Your mileage may vary. Anything I say that’s unhelpful to you, disregard it.

I followed the Way of Self Reliance for a long time. It was a huge, huge improvement over going through life trying to find happiness in life circumstances (like finding my true love). Before I started on this Way, I went around angry at the world, and constantly obsessed with how other people thought of me and treated me – because I felt like I wasn’t being allowed to have the things that I needed to be happy. The Way of Self Reliance helped me let go of some of that, and release myself from the constant sense that happiness was available, and it was (somehow) being unfairly withheld from me.

The Way of Self Reliance was a necessary preparation for me. It taught me the humility and discipline I needed to overcome my own worst tendencies. I don’t think that I, personally, could have learned them any other way.

So, if all this Way stuff is totally new to you, maybe try the Way of Self Reliance for a week. Don’t think about your life circumstances any more than you need to. Focus on becoming the kind of person you think you should be, without reference to anyone else or any other worldly things. And enjoy the little things in life as they come to you, without feeling like you need them.

If a week is too easy, try six weeks. 

But I have become convinced that this Way is not enough in the long run. We are not meant to be alone. And we are not meant to care only about what is inside ourselves, to care nothing about whether justice and mercy are being brought into the world.

When people take the Way of Self Reliance too far, they really do detach themselves emotionally from everything. In the Enchiridion, Epictetus speaks of the wise person having such total detachment from outside circumstances that they don’t particularly mind if they lose a limb! That may sound like he’s exaggerating or joking, but he’s dead serious about it. And there was a time in my life when I tried to reach that level of inner detachment.

I made a lot of progress toward becoming completely detached in that way. Looking back, I don’t think that was good for me. I ended up stifling my own ability to feel things that I ought to feel.

Again, I don’t regret that I started on that Way, and I don’t want to discourage anyone from starting on it as well. I’m just glad I found the other one when I did.

Think of the movie Frozen. Elsa, unable to find peace in Arendelle, retreats into a fortress alone on the mountain. But once she discovers how everyone around her is suffering because of her withdrawal, she can’t remain detached. Alone in her ice palace, she finds only fear and loneliness, and walls closing in around her. Anna rescues her by the Way of Higher Love. She doesn’t just sacrifice herself, she sacrifices herself for the sister whose anger and fear froze her heart and caused her own death.

“Let It Go” is, in fact, a pretty good summary of the Way of Self Reliance. And “Fixer Upper,” with its emphasis on loving people without expecting them to change, summarizes the Way of Higher Love. But what summarizes the Way of Higher Love even better is Olaf’s meditation: “Love means putting other people’s needs ahead of yours.”

If you want to see this case put even more clearly and directly, check out Kubo and the Two Strings.

I can’t leave without offering one more thought, because I think it will help you later on after you’ve started following one or both of the Ways. At first, it won’t matter so much which of the various different understandings of the Way you follow. At that stage, starting to follow Buddha and starting to follow Epictetus are more or less the same thing. But as you get further along, you will discover that the differences between the different approaches matter a great deal.

A lot hinges on whether it was Confucius, Solomon, Aristotle or John the Apostle who really got to the crux of the matter.

But that’s for later. I don’t want to burden you with that if you’re just starting out.

Let Me Know How You Feel and What You Think

Well, you’ve come with me a long way if you’ve read this far. Thank you for listening.

I hope that you find the healing I have found, whether you find it this way or some other way. It is available to you, if you’re willing to make the difficult journey all the way to the end.

Was this helpful? How do you feel about it, and what do you think?

Please let me know! I would love to hear from you.