How to Be Miserable

1. Embrace Inactivity and Unhealthy Eating

To increase your level of misery, reduce your level of exercise.

Sedentary Lifestyle. The cornerstone of a miserable existence is a commitment to physical inactivity. Avoid exercise at all costs, as even a small amount of regular physical activity can significantly improve mood and overall well-being. Embrace the modern convenience of a sedentary lifestyle, driving everywhere, spending hours sitting, and minimizing any form of physical exertion.

Dietary Imbalance. Complement your inactivity with a diet rich in processed foods, sugar, salt, and unhealthy fats. Ignore the advice of health professionals and instead, follow the cues of advertising, consuming products specifically engineered to appeal to primitive cravings. Avoid nutrient-rich foods like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, as these can contribute to improved mood and energy levels.

Advertising Ally. The advertising industry is your unintentional ally in this quest, as it promotes products designed to satisfy cravings rather than nourish the body. By prioritizing taste and convenience over nutritional value, you can ensure a steady stream of mood-lowering dietary imbalances.

2. Sacrifice Sleep for the Illusion of Productivity

Get by with as few hours of sleep as possible.

Sleep Deprivation. Prioritize productivity over rest, consistently cutting back on sleep to maximize waking hours. View sleep as a luxury rather than a necessity, and convince yourself that you can function optimally on minimal rest. This will lead to decreased concentration, irritability, and an increased susceptibility to stress and negative emotions.

Bedroom Design. Create a sleep environment that is conducive to sleeplessness. Ensure that your bedroom is too warm, noisy, and brightly lit, and use electronic devices right up until bedtime. Vary your sleep schedule erratically, going to bed and waking up at different times each day to disrupt your body's natural circadian rhythm.

Wakeful Time. When you do eventually hit the sheets, make wise use of the wakeful time before you drift off. Worry. Think about your schedule and the difficulties likely to arise tomorrow. Consider your life in a broader context, and all the problems you are unlikely ever to solve.

3. Self-Medicate with Legal (and Illegal) Substances

In the short term, these substances often perform precisely as advertised. In the long run, however, the diligent user can reap a substantial harvest in unhappiness.

Alcohol Abuse. Alcohol, a readily available and socially acceptable depressant, is an excellent tool for lowering mood. Consume it in excess, either through a steady pattern of daily drinking or through alternating periods of moderation and binge drinking. This will not only depress your mood but also impair your judgment, damage your relationships, and potentially lead to physical dependence.

Caffeine Overload. Supplement your alcohol consumption with excessive caffeine intake. Coffee, energy drinks, and other caffeinated beverages can trigger anxiety, irritability, and even panic attacks. By maintaining a high level of caffeine consumption, you can ensure a constant state of unease and agitation.

Drug Use. Explore the myriad downward possibilities offered by each substance on the prohibition list. Broadly speaking, however, the pattern is similar to that for alcohol—with the added bonus of illegality and all of the fun and consequences that can bring.

4. Become a Screen-Addicted Zombie

Spending thirty-four hours per week watching television (the United States average) will occupy fully 30 percent of your waking hours—twenty-three years of the average person’s conscious lifespan.

Passive Consumption. Maximize your screen time by spending countless hours watching television, surfing the internet, and playing video games. Choose mindless entertainment over engaging activities, and allow yourself to become completely absorbed in the digital world. This will lead to a decline in real-world social interaction, physical activity, and personal growth.

Online Activities. Fill your time online with activities that offer little to no intellectual or emotional stimulation. Read endless news articles, scroll through social media feeds, watch pointless videos, and engage in meaningless online debates. Avoid activities that might challenge your mind or expand your horizons.

Screen-Time Ratio. Calculate your weekly leisure screen-time ratio to ensure that you are dedicating a significant portion of your waking hours to electronic entertainment. Strive to increase this ratio over time, gradually eliminating any activities that might inadvertently improve your life satisfaction.

5. Chase Happiness Through Material Possessions

The best way to stop appreciating something is to buy it.

Consumerism. Embrace the belief that purchasing material possessions is the key to happiness. Constantly seek out new and exciting products to buy, and convince yourself that each purchase will bring lasting fulfillment. This will lead to a cycle of acquisition and disappointment, as the initial excitement of each new item quickly fades.

Storage Units. Fill your home with things you do not need, and when you run out of space, rent a storage unit to house your unused treasures. This will create a sense of clutter and overwhelm, further contributing to your overall misery.

Predictions. Base your purchasing decisions on the belief that your actions will bring pleasure in the future. Unfortunately, we are startlingly poor at making these predictions. Most Mercedes sedans are purchased not for the glories of German engineering, but for the mood that the buyer imagines will ensue—and its longevity.

6. Embrace Debt and Financial Instability

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Credit Card Reliance. Maximize your credit card usage, spending beyond your means and accumulating debt. View credit as a limitless source of funds, and ignore the long-term consequences of your spending habits. This will create a constant state of financial stress and anxiety, as you struggle to keep up with your payments.

Impending Doom. The greatest stressor is the sense of impending doom—that, no matter how pleasant one’s current circumstances may be, at any moment they could be swept away.

Financial Wire. As one gets closer and closer to the financial wire, misery-inducing stresses proliferate:

• difficulty paying the bills
• phone calls from creditors
• having to cut back on basics

7. Overwork Yourself to the Point of Exhaustion

You are to pour everything into your work: all of your time, your energy, your creativity.

Workaholism. Dedicate yourself entirely to your work, sacrificing your personal life, relationships, and health in the process. Strive to give 100 percent (or even 110 percent) to your job, and view any time spent away from work as unproductive. This will lead to burnout, exhaustion, and a sense of emptiness.

Short Time Horizon. You should also calculate your capacity for work using an extremely short time horizon. Ask yourself, “How hard can I manage to work today?” Avoid the longer-term questions, like “How hard can I reasonably and sustainably work for a year—or for many years?”

Meaningless Work. To enhance misery, you should instead see yourself as a mere hammer in the hands of the real builder—your boss, the business owner, or the faceless shareholders. Or as the nail being hammered.

8. Become a Negative News Junkie

The news media will work tirelessly on your behalf to find and report on every disaster, every capsized refugee boat, every failed bridge, every detonated bomb.

Constant Consumption. Immerse yourself in a constant stream of negative news, consuming every disaster, tragedy, and scandal that the media has to offer. Allow yourself to become overwhelmed by the suffering and injustice in the world, and convince yourself that there is nothing you can do to make a difference. This will lead to a sense of hopelessness and despair.

Avoid Certain Thoughts. You must not ask yourself why it is so important to learn about tragedies (coups, distant earthquakes, celebrity firings, election results) the moment they occur. The fact that such reports provide you no useful information will only undermine your commitment to viewing.

Sympathy for News Anchors. Cultivate your sympathy for the poor news anchors. For all the tragedy on the planet, they are often left grasping for new information, playing the same footage over and over, interviewing people who were barely affected by events, and scrambling desperately to fill the hours of empty airtime until the next exciting catastrophe.

9. Set Unrealistic and Vague Goals

Instead, make all of your immediate goals VAPID.

VAPID Goals. Set goals that are vague, amorphous, pie-in-the-sky, irrelevant, and delayed. This will ensure that you never achieve them, leading to a constant sense of failure and inadequacy. Avoid setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals, as these can lead to success and improved self-esteem.

Amorphous. The finish line for your immediate goal should be indistinct, so your depressive self can disqualify any progress you have made. Setting a goal to “work on the back garden,” for example, allows you to criticize yourself for not finishing everything, thus eliminating any of the satisfaction you might otherwise feel.

Delayed. Avoid setting a specific time for the completion of your goal. Instead, resolve to get to work the moment you “feel like it.” Because it is vanishingly unlikely that you will ever feel like re-caulking the bathroom tile, you can ensure that it will never be done.

10. Dwell on Past Regrets and Future Anxieties

There is no greater sorrow than recalling your happy days in a time of misery.

Negative Memories. Rehearse the regrettable past by focusing on negative memories, past injuries, and times you felt bereft, alone, alienated, terrified, and despondent. Include examples of random, uncontrollable fate knocking you about like a helpless pinball.

Future Hells. Construct future hells by believing wholeheartedly the anxiety-ridden horror films you play on the screen of your future.

Disqualify Good Memories. You can also disqualify and thereby erase your good memories:

• You have fond recollections of your first love, but with the darkness of hindsight, you can see that it was always doomed and that what you thought was love was really a delusion on your part.
• You truly enjoyed rock climbing in your twenties, but now you realize what idiots you and your friends were and how close you came to disaster.
• You got that award at work a few years ago, but it’s now clear they were just setting you up to take on a futile project that has since made your life hell.

11. Isolate Yourself and Sabotage Relationships

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

Social Isolation. Become an island unto yourself by avoiding social interaction and cutting yourself off from friends, family, and community. Embrace the privacy of modern urban living, and resist any attempts to connect with others. This will lead to loneliness, alienation, and a decline in social skills.

High Expectations. Hold high expectations of others by setting the inclusion threshold high. Create a mental or, better still, a written list of your criteria for your friends, acquaintances, and partners. Narrow the highway of your acceptance to a knife’s edge.

Toxic Relationships. Cultivate and treasure toxic relationships by collecting people around you who, one way or another, serve to lower your mood.

12. Eradicate Meaning and Purpose from Your Life

I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics.

Small Picture. Keep your eye on the small picture by avoiding contemplating the bigger questions of life. Remain fixated on the bark of the individual tree before you.

Impulses. Let your impulses be your guide by basing your decision on the temptation that you feel ahead of time.

Compassion. Look out for number one by viewing the misfortunes and unmet needs of others as being deserved.

Last updated: February 21, 2025