On being happy

This is my first article. And why not start with why we're here? Not with what Snapout is. Snapout is just a name, a concept. I want to talk about why I even bothered making it, let alone talking about it.

Should everyone consider using Snapout? No, I don't mean that. I mean everyone should consider being happy. Is that the most important thing on the planet? I'd argue it is. I've had a hard time holding on to it, and still do, but whenever I do, I just enjoy everything.

There are millions of ways to get there. Some people are just genuinely happy. Some are lucky. Some make good choices, wind up with a great partner or a great crowd. I'm not talking about them. If you're reading this, I don't think you put yourself in any of those groups.

I'm talking about being happy when happiness feels like the furthest thing in reach. Happiness when it actually matters. When we have it, we take it for granted. Those like us, and yes I mean you, know how valuable it really is. Being at the bottom, failing, isolated, unmotivated, comparing yourself to everyone and feeling down. Yes, I feel you. I am you.

That's why I built Snapout. I built it for myself.

About 8 months ago I went through a break in my relationship, after 10 years together and 7 of them married, and it broke me much harder than I expected. I had just moved from Turkey to the Netherlands, my job was barely paying enough, I didn't have a visa sorted out, I was looking for an apartment, and on top of all of that I'm someone who's been hard on himself his whole life, who treats himself as the source of everything that goes wrong, whose default inner voice is harsh and rarely lets up. All of it landed at the same time and I genuinely fell apart for a while.

What turned it around wasn't a single tool or technique. It was a small moment walking home after a therapy session, when something I'd actually heard a few years earlier finally clicked: the idea that being softer on yourself isn't a thing you understand once and then have, it's something you have to practice, badly, for short stretches at a time. So I sat with myself for 15 or 20 minutes and tried to be my own inner mother, the steady kind voice I'd never had in my own head, telling myself things would be ok. And weirdly, it worked.

The catch was that the moment things got hard again, that voice disappeared and the harsh one took back over. So I went home, opened ChatGPT, and over the next few days wrote a 2,000-line instruction file describing exactly how I wanted to be talked to in those moments. What to say, what not to say, what to do when I started attacking myself. Every time I caught the harsh voice taking over, I'd open it and talk to it. It felt like a small miracle.

Since then I've been through more, including a cancer diagnosis a few months ago and a company offering me a job and pulling it back a week later, and the inner voice has held. That's what made me think this should exist as a real product. For the people who are where I was, and don't have a 2,000-line ChatGPT prompt and a therapist of their own.

The world is cruel enough. We can soften the cruelty we cast on ourselves.