How Not To Be Unhappy: A Guide

Modern life is a lie. Work-life balance is a lie. I'm a career and life coach based in Silicon Valley who used to work at Google in programs and products. In my last role at Google, I worked in what I thought was my dream job at the time on the Well-Being Learning Team at Google where I learned the research and science on how to live a good life and feel happy.

Before that, I was a good little immigrant who checked all of the boxes of "success" as defined by privileged white men and capitalism only to feel deeply unhappy at the end of that long road full of bullshit.

I quit my job at Google and went off-script to create a meaningful life & career where I feel challenged, creative, and content.

I use data from Behavioral Science and Neuroscience (the research of our brain and behaviors) and wisdom from Literature & Philosophy (especially by women and non-Western cultures) to live a life that spiritually supports my mind and body, and financially supports my life goals.

I now help others do the same.

Everyone is welcome, but this is written specifically for minorities, immigrants, women, and people from disadvantaged backgrounds because I got tired of reading life guides by white dudes who have successful lives built on the invisible work of others and because they designed the system for themselves. Here's something for the rest of us.

My great grandfather and my grandfather starved to death during the Chinese cultural revolution.

My grandmother left my father and his sister, one dusky morning, beating him back when he tried to follow her down the dusty road leading away from their childhood home.

When my father was young, he begged for food in the streets. My mother stripped the bark off of young trees because you can eat anything when you are hungry enough. My father and my mother, both from rural Henan, a poor Northern province, studied hard to get into college, because it was their only way out of a life with death on one side, and back-breaking work in perpetual poverty on the other.

They were the 0.000001% that got out of a life where making iPhones in factories was the upgrade. Later my father beat the odds again, competing against children of far richer families to win the opportunity to study for his Ph.D. in America.

We took our golden ticket and immigrated to the US when I was 7. We began our American Dream in West Virginia.

Growing up in West Virginia was traumatic. Because I was Chinese in a sea of whiteness. Because Asian girls weren't yet fetish objects of a white boy's fantasy and so therefore desired by no one. And because I was quiet, awkward, chubby poor, and wore old lady dress sets from the Salvation Army. A multitude of sins that made me an easy target throughout elementary, middle and high school.

Homelife was hard in a different way. I lived in apartments where everything moved when I opened cupboards -- a sea of baby cockroaches fleeing the scene in mass. Apartments underground where I could hear rats running across my walls as I slept, tiny fuzzy poltergeist with sharp, clicky claws.

I spent days in the ladies' bathroom on a couch too close to the stalls at West Virginia University because we couldn't afford childcare and because my mother had to worked as a dishwasher at their cafeteria though she had a college degree and was a banking executive in China.

In China, she had escaped a life of rural poverty and achieved the Chinese dream --- moving to a city, reinventing herself as someone with power and worthy of respect. And now in the American dream, she was demoted back to a nameless and faceless dishwasher.

Whose dream was it exactly? I used to resent her when she told me that she had sacrificed everything -- her life, her career, her family -- so I could live out this dream. But I always knew too that it was true.

So, I did what good little Chinese immigrant girls do in America. I worked hard for my chance and kept my head down and my despair quiet. I studied hard and then harder.

It didn't matter that sometimes when I looked in the mirror I would have rising panic that the person staring back at me was a stranger, something that I only recently learned is likely a manifestation of depersonalization disorder - a psychiatric condition

Or when I started obsessively bargaining with myself senior year of high school after I submitted my college applications.

"If I finish this test before the clock hits 2:15, then I will get into the Ivy that my dad chose for me."

"If this light turns green before I stop, then I will get into the Ivy my dad chose for me."

"If this next light turns green before I stop, then I will get into the Ivy my dad chose for me."

"If this next light turns green before I stop, then I will get into the Ivy my dad chose for me."

And on and on and on every day all day long for months to my complete exhaustion.

Finally, I got into that Ivy League, my Chinese, immigrant parents' wildest dream for me. I thought I had earned the right to happiness now. . Wharton Undergrad -- the land of sociopaths in training and robber baron's children. I witnessed classmates laughing, literally laughing like they were oil tycoons in a terrible movie, in the face of panhandlers while they sat out in cafes eating their micro-greens and Chilean sea bass. My classmate was Ivanka Trump. Happy? It turned out, I didn't know what true misery was.

I was even more unhappy in college than I had been growing up, and my despair got louder and sadder. For the first two years, I didn't have any real friends. To give you the level of douchebaggery and sociopathy that was the cultural makeup of my classmates, Wharton kids are hated by Harvard and Yale kids for being priveldeged terrible people.

I could see myself, when I could see anything at all through the dense fog of being, not making it to graduation. When I stopped leaving my dorm room and attending classes my sophomore year, more than one classmate in our small class of 250 thought I had transferred out.

But then I got lucky and chose to study abroad in Tokyo junior year. When I came back, I found kindred spirits in my two forever best friends. I was saved by luck, a break in Tokyo, and friendship.

And then much later, after college, and the many missteps and re-inventions of my early career, I got into Google. Finally, I was the perfect achievement fairy tale on the outside. I had checked all the boxes according to societal instruction for what a Chinese immigrant can hope to achieve. I had the perfect job, the perfect boyfriend, I was thin (though secretly with an eating disorder) and accomplished.

But I didn’t feel accomplished. Only scared, anxious, stressed, not good enough. There was an entire year where I couldn't unclench my jaw, so I ground through a mouth guard, waking up with broken pieces of plastic in my mouth. My solution was a sturdier mouth guard and another 2 years passed that way.

On the outside, everyone thought I had the perfect life, an image I encouraged because it was the only reward I had for the chronic anxiety and stress in my life. My mother after a tour and free lunch at Google begged me never to leave and joked about submitting an application to clean the floors at Google. I remember feeling so sad when she made that joke. So this was our American Dream. You a mopper of floors and me, a faceless, nameless cog in the big machine of Google.

No one outside of Google understood the pain I was in, nor could I explain it to anyone who didn't work at FANG, so I kept buying into the fact that I could make this work. That there was something lacking in me which made this relationship terrible. It couldn't be Google, so it had to me. Because if this was the best place to work, then why could I make it feel that way? If I switched roles. If I found a better fit. If I worked harder on myself. If I take the meditation classes. If I take the leadership classes. Somehow my relationship to Google would stop feeling terrible and abusive and be exactly what it seemed to everyone on the outside.

Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. I put all of my attention into changing things and transforming myself. I switched roles every year. I got promoted. I took all of the soft skills classes Google had to offer. I had a mental breakdown and reinvented myself. New teams, new managers, new projects, new titles.

And then finally I left. There's a wild terrain of negative space in between those sentences. Tears, pain, depression, self-doubt, and yes growth too from the pressure of chronic discomfort and fear and the immigrant mentality to keep going at all costs because if I stopped, I would be as good as dead.

My therapist once told me gently that it was likely that I had PTSD from working at Google, but was so high functioning that eventually my mind would likely resort to a physical collapse to save me.

When I had chronic pain in my shoulders and got an MRI, my dr to my shock asked me if I had gotten into a severe car accident before because there were micro-tears up and down my spine. I had never been in an car accident, but apparently working at Google was causing my body physical damage as well as mental and emotional damage. Those years are a blur now. All I remember. The constant and chronic terror that I would never be good enough and that everyone would eventually find out and I would lose everything.

Now, I'm 38.

I coach people to lead a life with no regrets. I use research, science, philosophy, and wisdom from writers (especially women and minorities) to do my work. I started this work on myself in my 20s, but it was my last re-invention on the Well-Being Learning team at Google that trained me to ground it in peer-reviewed research and do it professionally for others. From that time, I learned the ingredients to a happy, meaningful life and more importantly how to incorporate them into the life of my clients and myself.

I own a home filled with books and flowers near a park. I'm deeply in love with my partner and my two cats. I’m the furthest thing from a minimalist although I respect and admire the philosophy to buy less. I don’t intend to retire early because I’m already living the life I’d want when I’m older.

I am athletic and healthy -- still working daily on self-compassion & the pain brought on my perfectionism, but far from the disordered eating that plagued me in college and on and off during my most stressful years at Google. I’m engaged with challenging, creative, soul-fulfilling, and sometimes frustrating, but meaningfully so, paid work.

I intentionally limit paid work to 20 hours* a week. The other time I save for my priorities --- gardening, eating breakfast in bed and other things that bring me small moment of delight, and work that has little "value" because it's not tied to our system of capitalism.

I learn K-Pop dances, memorize Chinese poetry, and sit outside my garden and look at trees. I read books. I think. I take walks.

The rest of my time, I spend learning, understanding, and healing a lifetime of wounds in myself and others. I fine-tune my schedule, I test out the latest research in habit formation on myself. I experiment in living and working in other places for months at a time to see how that changes my perspective. My life is made up of prototypes, because how can I teach this to others if I don’t practice on myself?

I'm excited to start Mondays and sad when Fridays are over. I'm still fine-tuning the weekends so that they are as engaging and fulfilling as my weekdays. I've strayed so far away from the cultural narrative of "living for the weekend", that I rarely talk about this with my friends because I'm aware it makes me sound like a terrible asshole.

It feels like immense wealth to spend my days in intellectual and physical pursuits outside of the capitalistic framework. I am happy. But more importantly, I am content. I spend most days the way I want to spend my entire life. Because I live in Silicon Valley, many of the people have significantly more money, prestige and things than I do, but still frantically doing and "achieving" their way to the next marker of success and happiness. Because I coach and my personal experience on the path to achievement, I know that many of these people are misguided in their goals and likely to continue to be unhappy. Chances are that if you are here still reading this, you know this too.

**********

Lies that were told to our parents and then passed onto us:

Study hard now, work hard now, and happiness will be right around the corner with that next job, promotion, partner, house, baby, car, boat, book deal, podcast or youtube channel, award. This mantra of the American life. Keep hustling until you die. Meditate and self-care so you can work harder. When that fails, find your drug of choice.

Use up and burn through every single resource in this world and then where there is nothing left to be used. Start using your own image and identity to make that cold hard cash.

My mentor at Google called it the Blackhole of Achievement.

But here's the secret, there is no be happy later once you've checked off all the boxes. There is only MORE boxes to check and this mad rush towards death we call modern life. That's how the system was rigged to keep you working longer and longer hours doing more and more meaningless bullshit.

Because if you are kept too busy and distracted jumping through the hoops they set, you won't have enough time to stop and reject this ludicrous and soul-killing game.

When I realized that the research on happiness doesn’t match up with this achievement narrative, I knew I had to get off the hamster wheel and out of their cage for me. I realized in order to be happy, I had to reject the narrative of the good little immigrant worker that was always meant to control what I did in a neat little system of meaningless, soul-crushing goals until I retired, died, or burnt out. I had to combust first.

I have to reject everything I've been taught and programmed to do while still using that system to support me. And then I have to step off the cliff blindly and make my way unseeing through wild, tall grass. I have to traverse a dark wood of self-doubt and walk through thorns feet bloodied. While my brain screams at me all the time of ridicule, shame, and hungry wolves. When I look out there, it is no wonder that it’s mostly white men who write books on principles of a good life. It's much easier to be authoritative when your life is easy and depends on a network of invisible work done by women and others trained to coddle and make space for you and historical, colonized injustices structured to benefit you at the cost of everyone else.

But as a poor fearful Chinese girl who was taught to always please others and perform perfection, I’ve drawn you my map. Your map will likely look different than mine. I only hope to show you an alternate path, so the difficult, seemingly impossible path you know you need to carve out for yourself can be lit with the empathy, hope, and light of a kindred spirit.

How Not To Be Unhappy (a guide)

• Don't call it free time

• Half-assed consistency

• Habits are the gateway to freedom

• Your environment dictates your behavior

• Quantify the unquantifiable

• Treat your career like dating

• Time Management - TAR

• You can have as many lives as you'd like, but not all at once.

• “How you live your days is how you live your life”

• The wolf you feed

• Shine theory

• (For my asian, black, brown, women, poor and disadvantaged friends) Legitimacy in this country is taken, not given

• Do not use extremes to solve problems of moderation

• Identify is a story you tell yourself and others

• Do Now, Think Later

• Stability, Contentment, Ease

• Idealistic Goals, Pragmatic Execution

• What's your anchor?

• Thinking is about control, doing is about learning.

• 間 (Ma)

*Sometimes when I tell people my goal is 20 hours of paid work, they think me as unambitious or think I'm not driven or given up on meaningful goals.

For an immigrant whose family literally survived death and starvation because of studying and a lifetime of sacrifice and hard work, it is easier and safer for me to work myself mindlessly to death than it is to do anything less. Living an intentional life with 20 hours of paid work for money was and still is painful and emotionally difficult. My decision involves hard choices, self-doubt, fear of the unknown and careful and creative planning. I saved more money than I’ve spent all my life, but especially to leave Google and start this path. I believe myself to be ambitious, though that label is itself a trap. But I'm deeply ambitious to create a life where I feel alive, engaged, and at ease.