Happiness for lazy people: Sven Heijbel at TEDxUppsalaUniversity

you I'm named after my great-great-grandfather span Larson and Sven Larson was a farmer's boy in the south of Sweden almost 200 years ago he was hanging out there in the south and it was harvesting his beets and he was stacking his hay and he thought to himself I hate farming this sucks so he was thinking I'm out of here but he was the oldest son so he was expected to take over the farm so we had to sneak down to the harbor at the age of 15 find a ship found himself a job and he took to sea and I didn't know if we were ever see his family again so Sven came back 20 years later and then he was a captain and he had a ship called Selma and I have a picture of some on my nightstand back home because it reminds me of my connection to Sven and his adventures and maybe he lives in me I think so because I like to explore too and my parents always say that when we need my sister when we were kids we would always run around in the forest but I would be the one who would run away and I wouldn't come back until I find something interesting in the forest like a rock that I was certain was gold or dead animal or something and most of the land today in the world is already explored but luckily as my friend Anita says we are infinitely deep so the soul is becoming my sea and it started five years ago so I was lying in bed and I was 21 and I was looking into the ceiling feeling like crap in the middle of a crisis because the UN climate negotiations were failing and I was responsible or at least that's what I thought cuz I dropped out of med school one year earlier to fix climate change and I couldn't do it and as it turns out fixing climate change is a really hard thing to do on your own in 1 year 2021 but that's how I felt and I was lying there and I was thinking if I'm not happy I'm not gonna help a soul I have to figure out what makes me happy so I looked back in time and I look at the times in my life when I've been the most happy and I found a pattern and I wrote myself a recipe and I followed it and it didn't only help me get back to normal actions start to feel better than ever so it's thinking there's something to this and since then I've been wondering you know do other people have recipes like this is there even a universal recipe for happiness if there is I want to figure it out and as you know a sane normal person would probably just go get a book and read about happiness right I felt a strong urge to get out of the forest and I'll come back until I find something interesting and my great-great-grandfather's when he used this tool to explore the world and I'd use something similar this camera I decided to go around the world and talk to as many people as I could and record those conversations talk about what make these people happy talk about happiness and their recipes and I was wondering is there a universal recipe for happiness and if there is what does it look like and before I talk about the trip let me just say a few words about happiness first the whu-oh has a definition of health that's pretty interesting and it goes like this health is a state of complete physical social and mental well-being a state of complete physical social and mental living whoever feels like that for more than 30 seconds in a row once in a while that's not happiness that's not health even you know if you feel like that complete physical social and mental well-being you're having an orgasm that's it instead I was I met a woman on my trip that had a really nice metaphor for happiness that I liked she said happiness this is a long-term mood that kind of feels like going slightly downhill on a bike you know you don't have to pedal like crazy to get somewhere and if you have problems you can just with small movements make kind of large turns stay away from slugs and rocks in the road so I started my trip and I ended up in San Francisco and if you were wondering who this guy was it's called Oscar that's the guy I met in San Francisco we talked about happiness and he stressed the importance of play he plays a lot Rick wakes up in the morning early to catch a few waves he's making videos together with his friends he's playing the guitar and in our culture we're not supposed to play when we grow up we're supposed to be serious but the happiest people that I met on the trip they were all playing no matter how old they were Nicole Oscar said something that I really remember he said most of life consists of everydays and if we're not making the best of those every day's we will have wasted our lives away waiting for highlights so playing every day that was his his motto and I took that ingredients and I wrote it down a month later I was hanging out with this guy some do from Bhutan and we were talking about passion and purpose and at this point of my trip I was really frustrated because I had met so many people especially young people out there who hadn't found their passion and purpose yet and they didn't even dare to think about it so I was worried I was wondering why this was and I met a 20 year old guy in a bus who kind of put the finger on it and he said I think it's really scary to think about your passion and purpose because we're afraid of what we might find we might figure out that our life suck that we're not living the lives that we want to and I think it's on to something big because when we dared to dream when we dared to embrace the dream and tell other people about it suddenly we're at the risk of failing and that's not OK in our culture that's something we need to change so I was frustrated and I was talking to some do about this and he said yeah yeah I agree do you know what I do to get over that fear and start to connect to my purpose and I said no please tell me what is it and he said I think about my 80th birthday and I think about what we're eating and I think about what I'm wearing and what what people I have invited and I imagine these people giving me speeches they're telling me you know have I loved have I lived have I contributed what am i leaving behind and I think Sam lose point is that in connection with our own death at the end of our lives we truly learn how to live and I think that's really important too and if we succeed in building that purpose of vision meaningful vision of what we want to do with our lives then we have a privilege of waking up every morning with a sense of direction and new energy so purpose was the next building block or ingredients later on I went to Wellington New Zealand and I was hanging out with Heather and Heather really inspired me because she has built her life around helping other people she's a nurse so every day she's treating cancer patients which is also chosen to live and invest in a community that is using sort of collaborative thing where you know one neighbor is molding everyone's lawns another neighbor is growing enough tomatoes for everyone else and Heather she's offering free lessons in laughter yoga and I think Heather makes it painfully obvious that we live in a culture that is self-centered just one hour away from where we are right we find the city of Stockholm and there's no city in the world with more single households per capita it's the loneliest city in the world and loneliness is toxic to the soul and I think we're meant to live together and I think were meant to help each other out so finally I came to Rwanda in Africa and Rwanda is a country that has been torn apart by genocide only 19 years ago and it's a fantastic place to go look for happiness by the way and I met this guy in mano L had a dream on or Emmy and Emmy was only eight years old when the genocide had Rwanda so we had to flee into the jungle together with his family and together with with his village and they built shelters in the trees and they had to follow the mountain gorillas this is crazy they followed the mountain gorillas to see what they ate and to try to eat the same plants and they survived they were staying in the jungle for two years because they didn't know the genocide was over how could they so the gorillas save his life and now amis working as a guide gorillas guide in a national park and we were hanging out and it was really difficult to get Amy to talk about himself he wanted to talk about himself as part of something else part of his family part is a village part of the jungle and he let me stay in his clay house and I was lying there that night and I realized that my perception of connection had been too narrow Amy taught me that connection comes in many flavors in many dimensions love a connection to ourselves connection to each other connection to nature to gods if we have any a connection to those who have been the more connected we are the less lonely we feel so I was doing this trip and I found 15 building blocks like these and at the end of the trip but I was looking at all my boxes and I didn't do my box and I was thinking god it takes a lot of work to be happy doesn't it and I think so especially in our culture because as I said I think we live in a self-centered stressful lonely culture and we have sort of disconnected us ourselves from all the good stuff and in our daily lives you know working 50 hours a week so it was like okay what do we do about this what do we do about the information of how the happy people live well I suggest oh I'm gonna answer the question first I went out with the question you know is there a universal recipe for happiness I think there is but I think it has to be tailored individually for it to work really so that's the first thing we can do we can design our own happiness recipe I'm gonna take a few fast ones here I'm gonna take health that keeps coming up and gratitude practicing gratitude and what we can do is to think creatively about how to design our lives in a way that we get the things we need without spending too much energy and remember that we are not in charge of our lives most of the time we have an autopilot who's in charge you know we act in patterns we do what we always do like when we wake up in the morning or when we get back from work we don't think about what we do and the beautiful thing about this is that it saves us energy and when our rituals are disrupted we get annoyed like for example when you go to work and you're listening to your iPod or your phone and you're usually listen to music and then it the battery dies and you're like ah now I have to think about else to think about so a ritual saves us energy and the good thing is that we can choose what rituals we want to have in our lives we can choose with social context we want to be part of and so this is the main point of my talk week inmates we can make smart decisions about what social contexts and what rituals we have in our lives that can give us this stuff for free and on the trip I saw several beautiful examples of this in San Francisco called Oscar we're sitting on the tram into downtown San Fran a it was thinking about the people that he loves one by one what do they need what are they up to how do they feel right now he was kind of appreciating their existence every day without thinking about it he gave himself a dose daily dose of connection and of gratitude in Wellington Heather loves to play music so she's jamming with her friends several times a week with it they're not jamming inside their house they're jamming out of the porch why so that other people walking by can enjoy the music so Heather has built herself social context living with her friends and a ritual playing on the porch that gives her constant access to connection to play to helping other people and I think is brilliant and the examples are endless they don't have to spend energy being happy it's happiness with lazy people and I don't know what's my great-great-grandfather's friend Larsen would say about all this he probably would say dude you got way too much free time or he might have been happy and proud but if he was here with me now on this stage closing this talk maybe he would have reminded us that whatever we spend our lives doing when we walk out of these doors we might just end up as pictures on the nightstand of our great-great-grandchildren and inspire them to do something really exciting Thanks you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 24,729

Rating: 4.7984495 out of 5

Keywords: Personal change, ted talk, Interview, Travel, TEDx, Uppsala University, tedx, tedx talks, Postive thinking, ted, Resilience, ted talks, Adventure, tedx talk, Happiness, Culture, ted x

Id: GCI3UWDVwxw

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2013