Mini-Essay:
The Self-Determination Theory
It’s bloody hard to be happy.
In mere minutes of scrolling, you can be exposed to plenty of anxiety, tragedy and suffering. Hell, even if you delete Instagram and throw your phone into the Pacific, there’s no escaping reality. The world is connected, and it’s easy to get the impression that everything is falling apart.
The modern career market, the fractured state of social life, the weight of the world’s politics—it’s a lot to bear no matter how many books on Stoicism you have read. We’re past the darkest and most violent days of history, which is to be celebrated, but even though we’re largely freed from the traumatic events our ancestors knew, we are instead fed stress through a drip.
Little by little.
Hour by hour.
Day by day.
Without a whisper, a fog of sadness surrounds us. Too often, we accept it as the new baseline, and that’s that. What happened to happiness?
Every second self-help author writes the same old book as their predecessor, and I don’t blame them. It’s what the world wants. The search for meaning and fulfilment is not above any of us.
The ‘self-determination’ theory is a simpler answer. It narrows the question of happiness (or more specifically, motivation) to three core legs: connection, authenticity and competency.
Connection
The ‘lone wolf’ idea tempts us sometimes, especially as we embrace the freedom (and cynicism) of adulthood. Zoomers like to give it a nice package, like ‘monk mode,’ or the more recent ‘winter arc.’
Both sound much better than ‘loneliness,’ to be fair.
Sure, it’s great to put your head down and focus on yourself, but doing it at the cost of connection is a tightrope walk, one with depression waiting below.
Even if we overlook that recent trend, loneliness is a real epidemic nowadays. Real friends start to become a luxury, not a given. Love is increasingly left to the algorithm—what was once sacred now involves scrolling through an online market of one-night-stands and situationships. The internet promised us connection, but instead, it locked us in our bedrooms.
I could go on, unfortunately.
The opposite of loneliness is bliss. Feeling connected to people is how we find meaning in our actions. The tapestry of life is not a solo-project—every lesson, struggle, triumph, failure and joy was made possible by the human body of civilization, whether that’s a newly-wedded couple, a group of friends recently liberated from college, or an entire city joined by a common struggle.
We are social, and without other people to talk to, cry with, and love deeply, we die.
Authenticity
I hate empty platitudes just as much as you, but there’s one I believe punches above its weight:
Just be yourself.
It’s so repetitive it’s meaningless, but if you pause to think about it for once, it has credence. ‘Being yourself’ means you drop the act. Rather than live as a shadow of yourself, you happily embrace your true character and ignore the contorting pressure of other people’s expectations.
If you cannot show off your true self, then your life unfolds around a façade, not you. Fake expression means fake friends, fake careers and fake fun. Once you shed that mask, you may well lose people, show up to fewer pointless nights out, and get restless with your current job. So be it. All that does is make room for the reality you once repressed. Only then can you have sovereignty over your decisions and feel comfortable in your own flesh.
Everything downstream of that moment will be more real, vivid, and meaningful.
Competency
There’s no greater shame than feeling useless.
We scorn the lazy husband who sits on his ass all day while the wife jumps from room-to-room in a tired frenzy of errands. We feel fomo when we die early on in a Halo match, and have to watch our friends survive on their own. We fall into restless stagnation when an injury keeps us away from the gym.
The feeling of helplessness is terrible, and competency is the antidote.
Competency is being good at what you do. It’s the comfort in knowing your skills, sacrifice, and work all amount to a higher good, whether for your parents, children, community, or even just yourself.
This is not a trend or fluke in human behaviour, but a core of our humanity, one as old as society itself. In a prehistoric tribe, everyone had something to offer, whether it was their skill as a hunter, talent in craftsmanship, effort toward child-rearing, or something else entirely. Nobody was useless. A common sense of purpose was free for everyone to enjoy, and the only real sin was reaping the rewards without giving any time or effort of your own.
Many years later, nothing has changed. People depend on us, and even beyond that, we still have a sense of personal duty to get good at what we do.
There’s a million skills for you to pursue, and something for everyone. Your competency can save lives on an operating table, make a few extra bucks for the household, or even just provide you with a sense of satisfaction as you finally get that difficult chord right. Meaning is not longer just a loose idea in your head, but a tangible set of results that you have control over, whether that’s an acrylic painting, a master’s degree, or your very own small business.
It feels good to be good.
Yours,
Odysseas
P.S.
I hope you enjoyed this issue—it was different to usual, and I always hesitate to release pieces like that. I clicked 'send' regardless, because that feeling of doubt is a bitch, and you should never prove it right.
As you (hopefully) saw in the subtitle, I'm giving away 100 USD of Obsidian credit.
To nobody's surprise, it's my absolute favourite writing/note-taking software, and there's a good chance you signed up to this very list because of the Obsidian tutorial I made a while back. I got so many emails of people telling me how they set their system up, along with all the interesting stuff they were working on. Much respect! It takes effort to get it going, so I thought the giveaway was best reserved for this quieter corner of the channel.
Enough ramblage.
To enter, just reply to this email. That's it. No extra homework. If you wish, I'd love to hear what projects you're getting on with in Obsidian, but a simple hello is just as good.
In 24 hours from the release of this email, I'll pick a winner at random and shoot you a message ASAP.
If you're reading this after 24 hours . . . it's over. Maybe next time. Feel free to reply nonetheless—I still eventually read and respond to everything, even if it takes several weeks (or eons).
P.P.S.
A new video on writing is coming soon, but in the meantime, you can have a look at the most recent one on hobbies.
P.P.P.S.
I'm well aware the self-determination theory is a real topic in psychology, and this essay is more my two cents on the topic rather than some deep empirical analysis. Let's call it a spin-off.
P.P.P.P.S.
My mini-essays are not actually this long in practice. I take a mini-essay from my Obsidian vault, then lengthen it juuust a bit, so it has enough meat on its bones to get a point across well.
If only there was a word to describe that.