Read: Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat

An interesting book that I recommend to anyone on a personal development journey.

I've recently been listening to a lot of audiobooks because I took advantage of a Storytel promotion. I have a habit of listening during my daily jogging - it used to be mainly podcasts, but audiobooks fit perfectly with this activity, and I feel they bring more value than podcasts, whose quality varies.

Mo is an engineer, which is probably why his writing and thinking style resonates well with me. I first encountered this author while listening to a podcast, and I already liked his philosophy and approach to life, which tested him quite severely. Generally, the book's thesis can be reduced to the fact that your sense of happiness mainly depends on your way of thinking. It's not events that make us suffer or feel unhappy, but our narrative that accompanies these events. By changing the way we interpret events, we can change our subjective sense of happiness.

In subsequent chapters, Mo presents, among other things, various techniques for influencing that voice in my head that interprets and comments on events. The first technique the author discusses is meditation and mindfulness. I practice meditation and try to introduce mindfulness into my life since a long time ago, so I know it works and I can recommend these practices if you haven't tried them yet.

The author, who as I mentioned is an engineer, derived an equation for happiness. Happiness equals perception minus expectations. According to him, happiness is the natural state of humans, and only the development of our ego and narrator that comments on events knocks us out of this state.

Happiness is therefore a conscious choice we can make. It comes down to accepting what happens and adjusting our expectations to reality. For me personally, as a Christian, this vision is consistent with trusting God, that He guides me and gives me everything I need for happiness.

Meditation is a practice that allows you to break away from the stream of often negative thoughts or those that are currently not useful and become a source of anxiety or stress. If you meditate yourself, you know what I'm talking about - it's one of the basic skills we should teach everyone, just like riding a bicycle.

The author addresses various aspects of life and his concept of how to live it to be happy. One of the chapters is devoted to life and death. The topic of death and the passing of people close to us can be a source of suffering and knock us out of the attitude of happiness. This was the case with the author himself, who lost his son. However, because he is an engineer, an analysis of quantum theory combined with the Big Bang theory helped him achieve peace. According to quantum theory, without an observer, particles are in a state of superposition and are therefore an indefinite wave of infinite possibilities until a (living) observer appears. So how could the universe and life on it arise without an external observer? In the author's understanding, according to quantum theory, life had to exist before the creation of the world because there had to be a conscious observer. However, it should be emphasized that the above statements contained in the discussed book are criticized by physicists, and no experiment has shown that consciousness is required to collapse the wave function (but at the same time, this has not been experimentally ruled out).

In summary, I appreciate Mo Gawdat's practical approach to happiness and recommend the book, especially for its engineering style of thinking. The main message of the book that happiness is a conscious choice resulting from accepting reality and adjusting expectations, I consider very valuable and consistent with the Christian attitude of trusting God and with many other philosophical, religious systems and currents of psychology and spirituality.

It is worth noting that this wisdom appears in many traditions:

• Stoicism (accepting what is beyond our control)
• Buddhism (suffering through attachment to expectations)
• Taoism (living in harmony with the natural order)
• Cognitive psychology (changing the interpretation of events)
• Christianity (trusting Divine Providence)