The Happiness Dimension

The math of self-discovery

Can you tell what this is a picture of? Well, it seems pretty obvious, it’s a red dot. What if I told you it’s not a dot? It’s actually two dots, a green dot and a red dot that are exactly in the same place across the X dimension. What about now?

When we add in the Y dimension, we can clearly see that these two dots are not the same. They may look the same when we look at the dots purely from the perspective of X, but when we add the Y perspective, it becomes a whole lot easier to see what these points really are. But who cares, they're just dots right? Let’s make these dots more meaningful:

Woah, now these dots are completely different. They represent two completely different realities. One where you take Job 1 and the other where you take Job 2. While initially these jobs may have looked the same when looking from the perspective of just Income, when you add in this second dimension (the dimension of Happiness), it becomes way clearer that Job 2 is the better choice since it offers the same Income, but way more Happiness. 

Now what’s the point of this simple overdrawn analogy that it took me way longer than it should have to represent through Google Drawings? To me it represents something intuitive that has taken me so long to figure out how to explain to myself and others and it is the reason I want to take time off of work, school, hanging out with my closest friends, all of it to just walk the earth. It is to find my Happiness Dimension. 

What is the Happiness Dimension?

The date today is July 10th and it’s been just over a month since I left my last full-time job. Not having a full time job leaves you with a lot of questions like, what are you doing?, what is the plan?, what are you going to gain from aimlessly walking around when in the end, you’ll have to find a real job anyway?, why get behind?, don’t do this, this is something only white people do. And I’ve felt strongly most of the time that there is a good reason to do this, there is going to be something meaningful gained from the time away, but all I could come up with is that I’m going off to “find myself” and lord knows I have no idea what that really means. To me the Happiness Dimension is the way I make sense of “what I’m hoping to gain” from my time off (feels more like my time on). It’s an added layer of understanding that only comes from spending time alone, with different people, and in different environments, of what helps me feel joy, fulfillment, whatever you wanna call it (I’m hoping I’ll know it when it comes). 

Odds are I may just get another job as a Product Manager afterwards, I may still live in Silicon Valley, and life may continue on afterwards just as if I had never left. This might be what the likely outcome is, maybe it’s even bound to happen. But even if this does happen, it won’t mean my trip wasn’t meaningful, as now I’ll have a new lens to view every opportunity and every decision from and as we saw from my earlier illustration, a new lens can make all the difference.

Leveraging the Happiness Dimension

Now we all already have a sense of this lens. I know I did. For me, when I graduated college, the lenses I was using to look at job opportunities were the lenses of impact, learning, and yes income (or at least that’s what I thought I was optimizing for). But I did have some notion that I wanted to be in a city since there’s more to do in a city, and it’s easier to make friends. I had some idea that I like good weather with plenty of sunshine more than bad weather where it rained all the time (like where I went to college). These factors had nothing to do with impact, learning, or income (at least in terms of why I was considering them), but they all weighed in on my decision anyway and even though I wasn’t thinking of it as this then, this is basically the Happiness Dimension. I already had some ideas, but the moment I got some space to stop and think, I realized that there was a lot left to learn and that this was still pretty hazy to me. 

Being free instead of being busy

For example, when I was working, I actually loved having a lot of meetings. I’m a super social person and I loved meeting people and working through ideas together. I did get a score of 92 on my extroversion scale. It also made me feel really important to be busy and surrounded by people vying for my attention. When I was no longer working full-time, I started working on projects alone. No more people to have meetings with and no one tasked with helping you figure things out if you hit a dead end, not very collaborative.

However, since then I realized how much I love the feeling of independence you get when you build something from start to finish, or when you learn something that seemed difficult at first, but now just makes intuitive sense. I thought that being busy made me feel happy, but I now realized what a great joy it is to feel like you have all the time in the world.

Changing how I think of “helping others”

On a higher level, I used to think that my fulfillment was a direct result of the impact I was having on the world. The higher the impact, the happier I become. But I realized that while watching a line go up and to the right on a graph makes me feel accomplished, having one person thank me personally for helping them, or even just being able to see their situation improve first hand was a different level of joy. I realized that I liked helping people, but on the super rare occasion when it occurred, I delighted in moving people and changing how they felt. 

What else can this dimension help me see?

All of these slow realizations that I’ve come to in just the last month open up a rabbit hole of possibilities. What else do I have left to discover? Am I really a night person, or did I never give mornings a try? Does working from 9 am to 5 pm really help me get into the flow the best, or is it when I take a break at 2 pm to play video games? How about having faith in something (am I best suited to forever answer “Spiritual, but not religious” in voting polls or is some other belief about life something I’m better suited for?) What about where I live or the kinds of people I live with. Do I want to find what work I want to dedicate my life to, or do I not want to dedicate my life to any work? Do I have to figure out how to get what I want, or do I really need everything I think I want? Can I make do with less?

For me this journey is just not about travel, it’s not just about having fun, or finding my true calling, or even drastically changing my life or circumstances. It’s about seeing the Happiness Dimension more clearly when making decisions. Maybe it’s selfish to just focus on your own happiness. Maybe you should just dedicate yourself to whatever helps out the world the most, or makes your parents the happiest. I’m not sure what the right answer is or of what you’re supposed to do. But if you understand your happiness dimension, at least you can make a better guess about when you’re making a trade-off. Or better yet, take the choice that has the same level of impact, that makes your parents just as happy, but that also makes you happier. With the Happiness Dimension, you can see the green dot that hides behind the red dot and make that choice.