Stephanie Harrison
speaker
575 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 24 Oct
Stephanie Harrison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
This is the heart of all of the work I do.
So you just nailed it with this description.
Honestly, it's because we live in a culture and a society that tells us to do certain things to become happy.
And as you said so beautifully, even though it doesn't align with our own experience and our inner knowing, we end up being very much influenced by that.
And it ends up driving our actions to deprioritize the things that do make us happy.
And
unfortunately pursue things that don't end up contributing to lasting well-being in the long term.
It's really what you described, this cultural understanding of happiness that teaches us that if you want to be happy, you need to perfect yourself.
You need to achieve more and more and consume as much as you can.
And you need to dominate other people and essentially cut yourself off from them and be completely independent.
And these messages about happiness, they seep into our lives in so many different ways, whether it's through our workplaces or through the institutions that we see or what we see in the media.
And so it becomes very hard to untangle them if we don't have that awareness about what old happy is.
The first old happy lie is that you have to be perfect because you're not good enough.
And so this pressure that we all feel, that voice in your head that tells you, I'm not worthy, there's something wrong with me, I'm broken, that we all have, it really comes from this old happy culture.
And in order to address it, we think that we have to perfect ourselves and essentially be almost like a robotic version of ourselves.
You know, somebody who's always doing everything perfectly and never makes a mistake and never struggles.
The second lie is really deeply connected to that, which is that you have to achieve more and more in order to prove how worthy you are.
And so that becomes a coping mechanism for so many people, particularly in our culture, where these things are rewarded and celebrated.
And we end up doing things like burning ourselves out, working ourselves into sickness or ill-being, neglecting our relationships and doing all of these things in order to say, oh, I'll be happy when I get there.
And the third lie is that we're separate from other people, that the actions of another person don't influence us, that our culture and systems don't have an impact upon us, and that we can basically do everything alone.
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