The World Is Conspiring to Make Me Happy

I love an “aha!” moment. One that invokes a couldn’t-have-said-it-better-myself, puzzle-piece-fitting feeling. 

A whopping ten pages into Matthew McConaughey’s book, Greenlights, I got one. 

Hidden in a list of facts about himself, McConaughey wrote: “I have a lot of proof that the world is conspiring to make me happy.” 

Isn’t that just the most beautiful dang sentence? And it’s one that doesn’t just apply to Academy Award-winning actors with charming southern accents. 

I am genuinely on board with the wave of thinking that what you believe, you attract. If you believe good things are coming, you’ll prosper. If you believe the world is out to get you, you’re in for a round of disappointments. 

Why? Because your perspective affects your internal light, and your light affects your ability to connect with others. When your mindset is more positive and more uplifting, your light will be brighter and you’ll attract other bright-minded people. 

This isn’t something I had nailed down into words before reading McConaughey’s passage, but I did accidentally try it on myself—successfully, thankfully!—many years ago. 

In my late teens and early twenties, I went through an “everything sucks” phase that is typical of my generation. In my mind, the “personality hand” I had been dealt was one in which I wasn’t particularly attractive or outgoing or engaging. And I lived in a world that was disproportionately wrought with pain and suffering and hard things.

Unsurprisingly, I wouldn’t have described my life as particularly rosy. 

But, at some point, something inside me yelled that this wasn’t working. This whole woe-is-me mindset just wasn’t it. 

So, I decided to pretend to be what I wanted to be—a friendly, outgoing, carefree person that was in love with life. There was little downside to this experiment, after all. 

The outcome—which, admittedly, took years to manifest—was better than I ever could have imagined. I not only became everything I had wanted for myself to my core but I started to attract like-minded people with ease. The whole thing initiated a flywheel of positivity. 

Suddenly, beauty in every moment and situation became effortless to see. And the amazing thing is that it had all been there this whole time, through the ups and downs of my youth. I just hadn’t been paying attention. 

That’s why, if I could ensure my kids learned just one lesson from me, it would be this: assume everything will work out for the best. 

Sure, sometimes you’ll get taken advantage of. You’ll fail. You’ll get used. You’ll make mistakes. 

But you’ll also inevitably run into more love and connection and success than would otherwise be possible. 

The best route to happiness is to assume the world is conspiring to make you happy. 

Because it is.