Skip to content

On Happiness

One of the experiences I've had which cemented my belief that money, or that attempting to purchase happiness cannot in itself bring happiness, was when I picked up the Dvorak1 keyboard layout. At the time, I was in the military doing clerical work, and there were hundreds of pages of documents that we were supposed to transcribe into Microsoft Word documents. The task itself was extremely monotonous and I was thinking of ways to improve it further. Once I picked up Dvorak, however, my outlook on the work changed. The task became fun, as I found myself slowly beginning to pick up the layout, and learn touch typing (something I had previously never attempted).

I think that the experience of learning a skill, or mastering a practice is in itself the source of the majority of our happiness. It is when we see our own personal development, feel that we've become a better person than we were yesterday, which results in contentment. Money may be necessary at the beginning, for example to buy a bicycle for cycling, a computer to type, or paper to write on, but it is really the effort, and progress, of learning and honing a skill which really results in contentment.

That contentment is something I have felt ever since picking up programming and subsequently being able to write my own tools and applications. It has made me realize that mastery of a skill itself is what allows us to produce works of value, to ourselves and others. It is the reason we see value in the things we envy - an expensive car, a finely honed mechanical keyboard, an exclusive handbag, or even a beautiful home. We are innately drawn to perfection, the product of skill, talent and deep work.

At the moment, I am learning how to use Vim, a modal text editor promising faster navigation and efficiency. It is not easy, and at times I am tempted to give up, and return to the world of mice and GUIs. But there are times when I successfully manage to type an entire article without using the mouse successfully, and it is those moments which keep me on this journey. Perhaps we must follow Sisyphus, constantly challenging ourselves, and that is what gives us contentment and maybe even meaning in our lives.

  1. An alternative to the QWERTY keyboard layout, with the most common letters placed on the home row. ↩

Comments