How To Become Happier Than 99% of People

The one greatest skill you've been avoiding your whole life.

Boredom is the greatest skill of the 21st century and nobody knows it.

If this is a shock to you, or if it sounds boring as a life-changing profound idea, then you’re currently still stuck in the same trap as everyone else.

Most people spend every waking second of their day trying not to feel bored.

They don’t know that boredom is the solution to the suffering they’re trying to ease with scrolling, consuming, and constant stimulation.

And there’s a reason.

There’s a reason why you grab your phone and check social media as soon as you wake up.

There’s a reason why you take out your phone while standing in line for a coffee.

There’s a reason why you can’t travel anywhere by foot or by car without listening to music.

You are trying to silence your mind by numbing it.

Trying to silence the overwhelming thoughts that won’t shut up, because what you want is silence.

Inner peace.

Less mental suffering.

Control of your mind.

Happiness.

But this is exactly what boredom offers and 99% of people try preventing it at all costs.

You’re currently taking the wrong, toxic path in trying to gain these things.

If you want to control your mind, to think clearly, and to gain the ability to have profound focus, this newsletter is for you.

Hopefully reading this won’t bore you.

Or I hope it does, so it shows you that you have a problem that needs addressing.

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The addiction everybody has (that nobody talks about)

I think we can pretty confidently say that most people want the same thing.

To suffer less, and to be happier.

But most people take a toxic route in trying to achieve this. They try to ease their suffering, be it overwhelming thoughts, emotions, the inability to focus on the present moment - the inability to focus on just one thing - and they numb their minds to death with stimulation and noise.

All so the pain feels somewhat tolerable.

They think boredom is the problem because it frees up noise for painful signal. For a thousand unwanted thoughts to come knocking at your door.

For me, when my Mam passed away when I was younger, it was staying up late, playing video games, and living off of chocolate and tea. I literally looked malnourished until I started lifting weights when I was 16. Not a great way of reducing suffering.

Or during the pandemic, I couldn’t sit alone with my own thoughts so I always had to be listening to music of some sort, all day. And I mean that. All. Day. The first thing I did when I woke up in the morning was grab my shitty Bluetooth earphones, and played Post Malone to score my morning routine - I didn’t even have a morning routine.

This stimulation trap is affecting everyone, even the people who don’t think they have much unnecessary suffering in their life.

The gym bro who has a profound sense of purpose from lifting 6 days a week but cannot fathom the idea of lifting without listening to music or a podcast.

The writer who has managed to build up their skill of being able to maintain focus, but can only do it for the 2 hours each morning in which they write; the rest of the day is spent trying to prevent boredom by scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

The issue is that 99.5% of people have an intolerance to boredom.

They are addicted to numbing their minds with noise.

And modern life capitalizes on this.

Social media is designed to hijack your attention, to exploit your boredom intolerance. You can’t even focus on one thing for 60 seconds, like a speck of dirt on the wall or a pencil on the floor, without your mind turning into a fucking frenzy.

You have trained your mind to expect constant stimulation in trying to ease your mind’s suffering.

But the stimulation trap creates the very problem it tries to solve.

Each time you avoid boredom out of fear of feeling anxious, restless, overwhelmed, or feeling unbearable mental suffering, you are becoming more intolerant to discomfort.

So, what you need is to increase how well you can tolerate boredom.

Boredom is the one thing you’ve avoided your whole life, and it is the one thing that will help to reduce your suffering and make you happier than everybody else.

And it does this by helping you gain profound focus on just one thing.

Let’s talk about that now, how boredom is a genuine superpower.

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Boredom is profound focus

Boredom is not the absence of interest, excitement, or pleasure.

It is the presence of profound focus on just one thing - your own boredom.

In most cases, you will be focused on either how bored you are or just the present moment. Or your breath. Or a particular dot on the wall. It’s pure and profound focus on just one thought. Just one idea. Just one thing.

And isn’t this what you want?

Happiness, for most people, isn’t about achieving something great.

It’s not about winning the jiu-jitsu competition, benching 100kg, or reading every book on Mortimer J. Adler’s reading list (I want to do it so bad). Because the “happiness” you feel when you do accomplish these things disappears once you’ve achieved them.

What happiness really is, is this.

Nothing.

It’s the ability to think about nothing.

To stare at the wall and focus on nothing but the wall.

To stare at a word in a book and think about nothing else but how the word looks on the page.

To stare at the blank page thinking about nothing else but what to start writing next.

In other words, complete absorption into one single thing, idea, or activity.

And nothing else.

When people say they are suffering, this is what they mean.

It means there is too much going on inside their head. Unsolved problems, existential worries, thousands and thousands of open loops not being closed which are sending their mind into a spiral. And most of these thoughts aren’t necessary because you’ve never learned how to close the loops by letting your mind breathe.

This is why boredom is the greatest skill you could ever possibly learn.

The reason why you spend a whole weekend binging Netflix isn’t because you want to overthink, and overwhelm your mind. You want to shut up your mind. You want to distract it. You want to escape reality. You want to think about one thing (the show or series) and not think about a thousand other things (intrusive thoughts, emotions, past experiences, worries about the future, etc.).

When you force yourself to be bored, you give your mind the chance to turn its scattered attention into the tip of an arrow head. The pain of discomfort you feel when you stop the noise, that painful signal that arises in your head, this is not a problem arising but a solution starting to take form.

It’s your mind learning to settle into stillness.

It’s what I call profound focus.

If happiness and minimal suffering are what you want, the good news is this.

There are two paths you can take and that choice is fully yours.

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There are two paths to happiness

We are numbing ourselves until death.

The path most people take is purely toxic.

And the peace they do feel is temporary. Usually lasting in waves.

You’re alright for a week. Your mind feels at ease walking to work. Maybe the weather is nice, so you feel nice, and you can handle your thoughts today for some reason.

You actually enjoy the scrolling for once.

But then it hits you like a truck.

The next week is spent in the fucking inferno. Your attention is scattered and being stolen by thousands of hooks across thousands of social post you see each hour. To combat the pain, you scroll more. And more. You listen to music more. You try to numb your mind more than is already possible, and the overwhelm becomes too much. You feel anxiety, depression, and a complete loss of meaning.

Chaos.

Thankfully, a very select few people are aware of all this.

They have decided they’ve had enough.

At first, it feels like hell. But this is what it means to build a lasting foundation.

By turning your weakness into strength.

They start building tolerance for the discomfort, which in turn turns into signal.

The mental noise reduces. The emails stop flowing. Their mind is finally silent because they’ve turned off the radio they had been listening to in trying to silence their mind with external sources.

Profound focus starts to emerge and they have obtained attention sovereignty.

They control what they focus on, what they think about, all by allowing themselves to sit in peace, therefore being at peace.

You cannot expect your mind to be peaceful when you give it anything but peace.

Noise.

Stimulation.

No tolerance for boredom.

If you want to have a more focused mind, you have to try focus on just one thing.

Not a thousand.

This is how you become happier than 99% of people.

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Framework: A profound guide to being bored

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Start with this.

You can do this as soon as you’re finished reading.

I want you to stare at a dot on the wall for 60-90 seconds, for 30-50 times every day.

That’s it.

It can be a dark speck on a bright colored wall.

It can be a word on a sign.

It can be anything specific that forces you to narrow your focus like the tip of an arrow head.

The reason why I want you doing this is to improve your ability to focus in short and intense, but frequent bursts.

Because most people don’t want to sit alone with their thoughts, or “meditate” (whatever your understanding of that word is).

Because 15-30 minutes of doing this for the first time, as someone who hasn’t sat in pure silence in over two years, would be incredibly difficult and overwhelming.

The motivation to give up and keep numbing might be too much.

So do this.

One minute of profound focus, on a specific dot on your wall.

Do this across a day, and this adds up to almost an hour.

It’s just a minute, but done 30-50 times.

I like doing this every 15 minutes or so when I feel my mind starting to get distracted or overwhelmed.

Or, if I’ve done some writing or content creating for two hours, I like forcing my mind to be bored.

Personally, I could think about writing my newsletter all day, so it’s nice to try and force my mind to focus on nothing else other than nothing. My mind struggles to get bored, so to speak, because I’m usually just daydreaming about ideas. I like trying to force boredom, and I feel it makes the hours when I do sit down to create much more consuming of my complete attention.

There are other activities that go well alongside this protocol.

Reading paperback books.

Reading books that genuinely bore you, if you want to force boredom.

I was reading Sigmund Freud’s The Unconscious last week, at a time when I wasn’t in the mood for reading.

In all honesty, I wanted to listen to my Solo Piano Mix on Spotify.

So what did I do? I forced myself to be bored.

And I nearly fell asleep at 1pm that day.

Another activity I would recommend is writing.

Learn to write.

When you’re writing you are thinking.

You’re actively training your mind to think about nothing else but the questions you are asking yourself - profound focus on just one thing (your questioning).

Write for 5 minutes each day.

Write a paragraph in a journal and think about it - stare at one word for 60-90 seconds even.

Learning how to focus is a lot more physical than you realize.

By forcing yourself to write, you are actively thinking.

By forcing yourself to stare at one dot on a wall or on a page, you are training your mind to narrow its focus on one thing voluntarily.

The ultimate goal is to develop profound focus through the art of being bored.

This is what will make you happier and suffer less than most people trying to escape the pain, avoiding the solution they didn’t know existed.

By being able to think about nothing else but how bored you are. By rarely thinking about reaching for your phone, or wishing to numb your brain with constant reels, music, stimulation.

Instead, to actively seek boredom in making your life more enjoyable. By making it less noisy. Less noise means more signal from your heart. Boring hobbies will become more interesting. Ordinary conversations, more electric. Needs change from seeking ease to building purpose. Suddenly, you’re able to come up with profound ideas that solve problems you genuinely care about. This is not something to ignore if you wish to be a writer, thinker, or creator - a profound thinker.

You cannot achieve inner peace until you learn to sit in peace.

The boredom you are trying to avoid is the very stillness you are trying to find.

Learn to focus. One minute at a time. Do it now. Stare at the wall for 60 seconds as hard as you can. Retrain your mind, and you will regain the profound mental control that you seek.

Thanks for reading.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

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