We've been sold happiness as a destination — something you arrive at once the job, the relationship, or the promotion finally lands. In this episode, Aggelos and co-host Manuel Mendez pull that idea apart.
They dig into why happiness behaves more like weather than a finish line, why most of us miss the moments we're actually in it, and why the harder you chase the feeling, the further it seems to move. It's a conversation for anyone who has done everything "right" and still feels like the good feeling never quite sticks.
Aggelos brings both sides of this to the table — the practitioner who sees the pattern across client after client, and the person who has caught himself chasing the same illusion. The result is less a theory of happiness and more a working map of what gets in its way.
Tune in to hear about:
- Why your brain isn't built to be happy — and what it's built for instead
- The difference between noticing your emotions and disappearing into them
- A reframe on fear and anxiety that changes what they're signaling
- Why safety has to come before pleasure, not the other way around
- Aggelos on a client pattern he sees constantly — the polished, over-analyzed answer that never lands
- A theory about distraction, comparison, and why neither one is an accident
Full transcript
Aggelos: I don't know how to start on the topic of happiness. Maybe we can start by defining it.
Manuel: Will you go ahead?
Aggelos: Okay. Happiness is a subjective emotional state defined by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment and fulfillment. If I would attempt it without seeing a definition, I would say pretty much something similar — a subjective state where my body chemistry perceives reality in a way that seems positive. And I guess the critical thing for our conversation would be both the word subjective, but also the word chemistry.
Manuel: I would add the word state as well. The way that happiness is portrayed in the media, we hear it almost as a goal. When I have this, I'll be happy. When I do this, I'll be happy. There's condition and there is end goal. That's why I like the word state. All states are temporary. So if all states are temporary, we can never expect happiness to be forever. It's a state, it's fleeting, it comes and goes. And that's why it's so important to really hone in on this word. Happiness is usually sold as an end goal that will be there forever once we achieve that thing. And that's the illusion. And we know it's not true because we've all been happy and then sad and happy and sad. But there is something about the way that our brains work that wants to believe that happiness is going to be forever. Once I finish my PhD, life will be okay. Or as long as I get that girl or that job, then I'll be happy.
Aggelos: You mentioned "once I do that, I will be happy." I have plenty of clients that come with a similar request: I don't want to feel unhappy, I want to be happy finally. I don't want to feel anxiety. And I sometimes want to tell them — if we release expectations for being happy, we get happy. Although the way we get happy is not the way that it is portrayed or that we expect. We expect happiness to be a state where we are running in the field, glowing.
But in reality, being happy includes not noticing you are happy. It includes not noticing yourself, not being so much inside your thoughts and how you're feeling. When you are happy, you don't notice it so much. So you might have plenty of moments during the day that you are actually happy, but they just pass unnoticed. On the contrary, you mostly notice moments that you are unhappy.
When I'm saying moments of happiness, I literally mean: you're waking up next to a loved person. And that becomes reality at some point. You don't notice that you are happy because it's a status quo. You will notice it only when the perspective changes, when you stop having that. Or you make a little coffee and sit at your favorite corner, and you just relax, and you don't notice you're happy because it's just there. Even from an evolutionary standpoint, our brains are not made to be happy. Our brains are made to survive.
Manuel: I would add — our brains are not made to be happy, but our brains are made to be regulated. The brain always seeks regulation. And there's a reason why we have this stress response — if you put someone in a Formula One car speeding, the first time it'll feel like, my god. But by the tenth time, they'll be way more composed, way more regulated. The brain is built for regulation. And there's a lot of dysregulation in our world due to high stimuli, which is important because it also blocks you from achieving certain states such as happiness.
The expectation of happiness is another illusion. It's almost like trying to chase a stray cat in the street — the more we chase the cat, the more it runs away from us. But maybe if we just go about our day, maybe sitting having a nice coffee, the cat just comes up and nests next to us. What we chase usually creates distance from us. And when we let go of the expectation — I don't need to be happy, I don't need to feel any specific state in order to just be — then we create space for something way bigger to come.
And I think the expectation of happiness is also what keeps us on the wheel. It is a mechanism of control — as long as you keep dangling the carrot, hey, you'll be happy when you do this, you'll be happy when you get the promotion, it's used to control us. We live in a time where most humans don't know what feeling good is. So we almost take the external notions of what other people tell us feels good and take it for ourselves. We don't know what's good for us, because we're so busy running all the time that we don't even take the time to sit with our bodies and ask, do I really enjoy this?
Aggelos: On one hand I agree that we are lacking the necessary time to just sit with ourselves and notice that we are good. That touches a lot on the grounds of gratitude. On the other hand, what I'm noticing a lot is over-noticing. We tend to over-notice, partially as an outcome of self-help content out there. It's a little trendy to notice yourself too much. Neither not noticing your emotions at all, nor over-noticing all the time are necessarily right attitudes in life. When is the time to notice, and when is the time to just be without noticing?
Manuel: I would start by saying that the over-intellectualization of an emotional problem is a defense mechanism in itself. It's not a processing of the problem. It's almost like you contain it — okay, now it has form and I can observe it, but it's not going anywhere. Because I can't think my way out of depression. Imagine someone is having a depression, and you're like, just think about it this way — you can try as many reframes as you can, but the depression lives in the body. It lives in a somatic ecosystem that needs to be addressed, not just the mind.
And what is interesting — the irony of it — the same tool that allowed you to perceive your problems is not the same tool that's going to allow you to solve them. You might understand all the attachment styles, you might know all the books, you might have spoken with all the therapists, but you're still doing the same things. The brain is also safe. Because we just don't want to feel bad emotions. Over-rationalization as a defense mechanism.
So where you really need to go is actually feel. And — going back to answer your question — the line between being and over-intellectualization, I think it's like anything: it's practicing. You practice going back to that space of body awareness. I used to hate this. I used to be the guy that over-intellectualizes. And when someone would tell me, let's do a breathing exercise for ten minutes, I'd be like, I don't want to do that. I want to keep talking. And that's my safe space, because I know I don't need to face my ghosts if I stay there.
Something really deep happens when we can't fight the silence. For instance, in psychedelic-assisted therapy — when people take psilocybin or MDMA — one of the things the therapist will say is try not to verbalize what you're going through, because once we start verbalizing, we get out of the experience.
Aggelos: Yes — you're using parts of your brain that are wired towards intellectualizing and rationalizing your thoughts.
Manuel: Exactly. And that's a reason why people often say that therapy doesn't work for men as much as it works for women — men are experts at abstracting to the intellectual space, while women are more connected to their emotions. So if someone wants to start being more in the body, it really starts with: if you can do breathing exercises, great. If you can't, then sit for five minutes without doing anything and see how that feels. Not trying to meditate, not trying to shut down the mind. Just sit and not do anything. And if you feel discomfort, you're probably in the right place, because that's just the surfacing of the emotion you've been suppressing all the time — now it has space to come up.
Aggelos: This is one of the easiest, and the hardest, at the same time, and the best exercises that I have done myself. It's kind of hard to persuade my clients to do them. In fact, everything you told me reminds me of a particular client where we were doing a breathing exercise. When you do these sessions of being, impulsive thoughts come, connections between thoughts, silly stuff, fantasies, daydreaming, thoughts about past moments, totally random stuff comes to your brain. And all this random stuff that comes to your brain is rarely random.
And I remember this particular client — every time he speaks to me, his sentences are extremely polished. His feelings are always double-checked. So when we do these breathing exercises and I literally ask him, hey, what do you notice? And he's like, yeah, I'm actually thinking of that day where this happened, it wasn't necessarily my fault because that, but I was wondering — and I was like, no, dude. Just tell me what you notice. And some people just find it extremely difficult to just be, to sit there with their thoughts.
We were doing some somatic shaking exercises with another client. He was on the floor and we were doing some exercises for the pelvis, for all the tension held in that area. And he was shaking — literally, your body shakes by itself. I remember exactly my own feeling when I've done that — my body was shaking by itself, almost involuntarily. But at the same time, your nervous system is guiding your body towards where to move. What I'm trying to say is that people nowadays don't understand that the conscious analysis of our thoughts is only 10% of what can actually lead us to desired states. But it gives us a false sense of control.
Manuel: I think the room aspect is a good one — it's why people with agoraphobia choose not to go into the world. It's safe. You know where everything is. But trying to change the world is a much harder task. And there is this sense that to live in the world, we need to be able to live with uncertainty. We need to be certain in ourselves in a very uncertain world.
I would say happiness is a state of pleasure. It feels good to be. But one thing I often say is: in order to feel true pleasure, you need to feel safe first. Because how can you allow yourself to feel good if there's a threat nearby? When there is a threat, when your nervous system is turned on, there is nothing else more important than guaranteeing your survival. And unfortunately a lot of people live in a low fight-or-flight type of system, and they don't even realize that. It's the small things — maybe I didn't sleep that well, but I'm accustomed to it. The tiny road rages where you get too angry. There's that saying: we don't see reality as it is, we see reality as we are. And if we are in a perpetual state of fight or flight, we'll always see everything as a potential threat.
And there's also a very important note. I think it was Carl Jung that said that the depth of our positive emotions has to be the same as the depth of our negative emotions. So if your body is now able to feel really happy, it's now able to feel really sad as well. But that is a good thing. People are like, I don't want to feel really sad, I just want to feel good all the time. There's no such thing. You need to welcome the bad with the good. And the good will only be good because you've experienced the bad.
Aggelos: I fully agree that the depth of experiencing negative emotions is equal to the depth of experiencing positive emotions. And that reminded me of something — happiness is like the matriarch of the house, and she doesn't enter a house unless her children — anger, fear, sadness — are welcome. So if you don't welcome your negative emotions, you cannot also welcome the mother of them, which is happiness.
I was watching a video where someone was proposing a frame that landed very well on my brain — every time you are experiencing anxiety or fear about something that is about to happen, a nice frame is to welcome it. When you're afraid of something, it's life giving you that challenge so that you overcome it. So the more you are pushing these fears away, the more you are blocking yourself from overcoming them and experiencing the opposite — happiness. As you said in our previous conversation, you are leading almost mathematically to anhedonia.
And I know it's way more complex, but there's a frequent confusion between dopamine and serotonin, between comfort, temporary safety, and happiness. Comfort and dopamine can be reached if you lock yourself in a room and watch reels all day. But serotonin requires a healthy balance between self-fulfillment, serving others, thinking of your emotions. It needs a balance that includes being a little unsafe, getting out of your comfort zone. But getting out of your comfort zone, in the sense of the state of flow — which gets reached when the amount of challenge you're having is just at the specific threshold that puts you in challenge, but you can still overcome it.
Would you say that in the Western world we kind of have small challenges in reality, which leads us to overthinking and ruminating?
Manuel: I think in the Western world — this is going to be not super politically correct — if you take a look at tribes in Africa, some of these tribes don't really even have a word for depression. It just doesn't exist. A Westerner could look at that and say, but sometimes they lack water or food. Yes, they lack all those things, but a lot of them are probably happier than most people in Western society.
Western society, from a psychological point of view, has it harder. Because we need to find meaning in a world that has given us everything. It's harder to find purpose when you don't need to go hunt for it. No one dies if you choose to stay in your room the entire day. Your life is at risk, but you don't realize that, because you can live day after day and just postpone things. And everything is working against you — the food you eat that's really tasty is probably working against you, the media you consume is working against you. So there is this self-actualization process that needs to happen, almost for you to extract yourself and go, I know what's good for me and what's bad for me.
And to your point that we have too small of problems — fear is a really good signal of things that we need to overcome. It doesn't mean that we can't face it. But for most of us, fear is something we want to move away from. And a lot of anxious people are really smart people — they're trying, in their brain, to foresee every potential future path that life will take. But a lot of it is usually a negative outcome. How can I protect myself from it, how can I avoid pain at the biggest possible spectrum?
And that leads me to something very interesting — what you're afraid of is not the event itself. What you're afraid of is what you'll feel if the event happens. That's what you're escaping from. So if you're afraid of losing your job, my best advice, rather than anxiety as a prevention method, is to try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who lost their job, and really feel into the emotions of what that feels like. It's going to feel horrible. But if you sit with it for one, two hours, it's going to disappear, because your body is processing the feeling that it's so afraid of — and the anxiety will stop.
Aggelos: Very practical. Sometimes the problem there is that some people are just over-cognitive — when you do this exercise, you might calm down, but you might not be conscious that you calmed down. The realities and states that they notice are the ones that their cognition clearly and consciously notices. Another reframing could be just to ground yourself towards what's actually the reality of the fear. Am I socially dead at the moment? No. So I'm afraid of something that doesn't exist yet. I'm in the present, sad for something that is literally non-existent. It only lives in my brain.
That's why sometimes you might need someone to literally tell you, hey, how much did you score that anxiety from one to ten? How much are you scoring it now? So that we literally drag your attention towards noticing that anxiety and scoring it.
Manuel: I've had three depressions in my life. And once I got out of them, the biggest mistake I made was thinking that I understood depression. Depression is different for everyone. And when you're inside that state, if someone comes and claims, I know exactly how to take you out of that — that just turns you off very quickly. Any good psychologist will not come in and say, I know exactly what's going to work for you — they're going to guide the person back to another state.
Do they have depression in those tribes, or not? I think I would argue that they probably don't have as much depression as the Western world, if you could compare in terms of percentages. And if they do, probably the environment itself doesn't allow them to ruminate too long in it, whereas we have environments that allow us to be in that state for long periods of time. You go to work, you come home, you watch Netflix or doomscroll, so you're suppressing any negative feelings — and you can do that every single day for years, and you'll remain in that state.
There's this really interesting phenomenon where we process emotion kind of like a computer sitting idle — we don't have anything else to do, our brain starts processing emotion. Way back, if you needed to walk to the village for two hours, you're literally walking in nature, not doing anything else — your brain has time to process those emotions. It's not like you get in the car, put on loud music, get home, doomscroll, and haven't even processed what happened three hours ago. So we lost those moments of being able to process emotion.
Aggelos: Chemical imbalance can be caused by your subjective perception. Ultimately, the question is whether your depression can be caused primarily by a chemical imbalance caused only physiologically and not impacted by your subjective state of reality — because if that's not the case, then you can cause yourself a chemical imbalance. Absolutely you can cause that.
I remember a case study that was published a few years ago — there was a woman who was heavily abused by her husband, and while experiencing the abuse, considering that she grew up in a culture where that wasn't necessarily seen as bad, she didn't experience trauma. But when NGOs helped her escape and she moved to the Western world, she started listening to other people telling her how traumatic what she experienced was — and she reported PTSD afterwards. It is getting proven that even trauma is a subjective state, is a state of how you perceive what you experienced.
So every state is individual, every depression is unique, every trauma is unique. But just the fact that everything is unique doesn't mean it doesn't have specific characteristics. I think we have to normalize that if I'm feeling depressed, it doesn't mean that my state is depressing — it means that I am perceiving my state as depressing. And of course that will cause a chemical imbalance as well. The conversation between chemical imbalance and depressive state is a chicken-and-egg conversation — the one is causing the other, and the other reinforces the one.
What do we do for people reporting depression nowadays? We give them SSRIs. I'm not a clinical psychologist, so I can't speak about that with authority. Yes, there are some people that need SSRIs — especially when you are reporting very intense depressive symptoms, maybe you're being suicidal. Pharmaceutical approaches are necessary in order to stabilize you so that we can do the work. But there are a lot of psychiatrists that just give SSRIs like it's candy. And what you will hear very frequently from people getting SSRIs is, I want to get off of that — because I prefer to experience the sadness — because if I experience the sadness, I can also experience the happiness. By numbing the feelings, you're numbing both the good ones and the bad ones.
If you are living in a mini-society where on an everyday basis you are challenging yourself with making food, building your house, you are constantly being challenged with things that are within the scope of your expertise but important for your survival, it's kind of hard to experience depression. You are constantly being challenged with things that lead you, mathematically, to daily self-fulfillment. I cook that food, I feel self-fulfilled. I feed my kids, I feel self-fulfilled.
So this is one part of happiness — self-fulfillment. The second part is doing something for others. There needs to be a healthy balance of doing something for me, doing something for others, and doing something spiritual. A lot of people reporting depression are doing exclusively things for themselves, so they don't have a meaning, they don't have a purpose. Or they only do stuff for others, so they don't take care of themselves. We need a healthy balance between the three. And the other healthy balance is between thinking, doing, and feeling. A lot of people reporting depressive symptoms are hyper-cognitive — they're thinking a lot, ruminating. Others are doing a lot and don't stop to think, to feel. Others are feeling all the time and lacking the other two. A healthy balance between all those things is technically the path towards experiencing happiness.
Manuel: I agree with everything you said.
Aggelos: I don't find it completely coincidental that people nowadays are being conditioned to chasing happiness as if it's a state they can achieve, nor having so many distractions. And by distractions, I mean social media. If there is a way to achieve mass control, it's not by imposing slavery, by throwing them into cells, but by distracting their brains non-stop — and giving them 24/7 comparisons.
So what is the self-help industry doing? Giving you a state that you cannot achieve, so that you constantly compare your state with that state, so you're constantly chasing for something, and therefore you're buying that content, consuming that content, in the pursuit of finding the silver bullet in order to achieve that imaginary state. And what do we do on LinkedIn, which I call the Instagram for professionals? We get in, and we constantly compare. So I think if there is a new world order, if there is mass control, this is it.
Manuel: Do I think that there is control in the way that social media and marketing is served? Absolutely. Do I think there's a big mastermind that thought about all this stuff way back? Not as much — I think humanity has become a hostage of its own development. Take a look at the internet — amazing technology, allows us to all be connected. What led the development of humanity though? The porn industry — that's what moved it fast. So we come up with this amazing technology, and the technology is used for our most primitive needs. And we live in a mostly capitalistic world — once companies realize that can be leveraged for profit, then there is an incentive to keeping people on the platform.
Entertainment has become a political weapon. But guess what — it always has been. The Romans had the Colosseum to keep people entertained. Because when you keep people entertained, you keep people docile — they don't revolutionize, they don't have time to think. As long as you keep people fed, happy, and entertained, they will not think for themselves, because they don't need to.
I don't think it was an absolute mastermind plan that started somewhere and led us here. I believe it started out of ingenuity, the same way that AI started — this is a really cool technology, we're going to work with it. And then human greed and different components get involved. The technology gets invented, and then we don't know where it leads us. Wasn't it Oppenheimer? He didn't want it to get used. But this is revolutionary technology. And then there's the contrast of: do I invent a technology that can destroy an entire nation, or do I keep it outside of human consciousness?
Aggelos: I don't imply that all these technologies were invented in order to achieve mass control. But the way that they're evolving would certainly justify regulation. When we discovered nuclear energy, at some point we regulated the use of nuclear energy — outside of that, it implies you are building a bomb. But when you have research proving that the usage of Instagram is a risk factor for teenage girls to kill themselves, and you don't regulate that — or when you have proof that algorithmically we're being served with extreme news more than average things, ultimately being conditioned towards finding average emotion generation boring — that makes me a little suspicious.
The reason I mentioned that is because we've made this conversation of almost one and a half hours about happiness. But one of the first things that one can do in order to experience emotions, to get on the road towards happiness, is —
Manuel: Get away from social media. Stop.
Aggelos: Just leave the screens aside. Even experimentally, just for minutes — five-minute sessions, half-hour sessions — just shut down all screens, all distractions, and sit. Because these are the things that are preventing you from experiencing your emotions, from processing the heartbreak from the princess.
Manuel: Yeah. It's a good one.