Excellent Advice About Maximizing Misery as an Effective Way to Become More Positive About Life

The wonderful CGP Grey has put together a list of Ways to Maximize Misery, putting animated emphasis on never exercising or going outside, sleeping a lot except for bouts of insomnia during which the internet will offer support. Grey also suggests the setting of unreachable goals helpful in maintaining one’s misery.

I will turn the wheel one degree right now instead set the productive part of your brain on. Vapid goals, vague amorphous pie-in-the-sky irrelevant delayed, make the target unclear and the path unclear if motivation strikes aim ridiculously high to guarantee failure. I will clean the whole house today is much better than I will do the laundry in this pile. Cleaning a whole house is impossible there’s always more to do so you will always fail.

Grey also added a helpful footnote explaining that this method of mental inversion, adapted from the book “How to Be Miserable” by Dr. Randy J. Paterson, is actually a unique way to inspire positive thoughts.

It’s worth saying explicitly at the start that the obvious actual goal is to achieve happiness, not misery. But you, like me, might find the advice on happiness kind of tiresome. Almost irritating. So it might be more useful to think about how to achieve the opposite. And thus, to see how the actions we might take work against us.