The secret to being unhappy — so you can stop doing it

In this episode of The Fuck It Shift, Adam Ross breaks down the simple recipe for being unhappy — not so you can stay there, but so you can recognize it and do the opposite.

Adam talks about how unhappiness often starts when everything becomes about you: what you didn’t get, who let you down, what isn’t fair, and why everyone else is the reason you feel stuck.

He also digs into the role social media plays in feeding that mindset. The things you scroll, watch, follow, and let into your brain every day become the seeds that shape your thoughts, your mood, and eventually the way you see your life.

This episode is about paying attention to what you consume, breaking the cycle of negativity, and learning how to choose better inputs before your algorithm starts choosing your mindset for you.

Adam also talks about the power of subtracting — removing the noise, the junk, and the low-value content that fills your head without giving anything back.

Because sometimes the way to build a better life isn’t adding more.

It’s clearing space for better thoughts, better seeds, and better fruit.

Socials:

IG: @adamross_online
TikTok: @adamross_online
LinkedIn: Adam Ross

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Fuck It Chip Podcast. My name is Adam. And as always, I'm joined by producer Jay, who's going to ask me a question off the top.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

I'm going to put a little spin on a question we've kind of covered a little bit before, but a different angle from it. And what would you say is the secret to unhappiness?

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Well, if you want to be unhappy, here's a real simple rule. Unhappiness is simple. Stay focused on yourself at all times. Give a shit only about yourself. In fact, be so focused that all you care about is what you didn't get, who's not giving you what you want, what you didn't get in life, how your parents fuck things up, how it's all everyone else's fault that you're not getting what you need. That will lead to feeling isolated and angry. And that will lead to more than likely to being depressed or very focused on just how unhappy you are with life. And when you get to that point, then you're just not able to give anybody any part of yourself or pay attention to what anyone else's needs are around you. And isolation will happen naturally. And poof, you're unhappy.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

So that's the whole like woe is me kind of thing. And you know, I deserve this because of XYZ.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Yeah, or you're not paying attention to what you're feeding yourself. When you do not pay attention to what you feed your brain, and we've got that one little slide on our social media channel that talks about if you want to have an unhappy life, make sure you feed yourself negativity. And it has just those written words, that small sentence, has more shares and more comments on it than long-form video, simply because there's straight to the point. Unhappiness is all about telling yourself everything you're not getting in life and then feeding it by watching stuff on social media that tells you that you're not getting what you're supposed to be getting in life.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

So to get to the point to the person listening to this who might say, That's me, I tell myself those things all the time. To get the opposite, is it as simple as just not doing that and switching? Uh, is there a slow process? What's your advice on how to flip that script or to shift it?

SPEAKER_01 2:09

100% how to shift it. 100%. I got a comment on a video where I talked about this exact thing, and the comment was, duh. Well, if it's that obvious, then do it. You need to break the cycle and pay worse, you need to just first pay attention to the cycle. I talked to one of the young guys uh on my comp uh in my company uh last night where he I said uh he was talking to me about social media in the channel. He goes, I don't know, like I know you got a lot of views, but I don't have social media. And I said, Why? And he goes, Because it's just full of negative shit, and my life's already rough. I don't need to add to the pile. What are you adding to the pile? I talked to the about my wife with this all the time that the social media, the scrolling that we do as a society, you if you really paid attention to what you stop on, so rarely is it positive. And I fall into this trap. I'm stopping on stuff that isn't happening in my life. Tinder cheating and uh, you know, all this negativity, uh, people being arrested, none of that shit's happening to me. Why am I stopping on it? Well, I'm not paying attention to what I'm allowing in, and that helps your that helps feed your unhappiness track. So if I'm not heli skiing, if I'm not my company's not doing this and making this much money, if my children aren't reaching these levels of success, am I unhappy? Am I failing? Uh we just had some low numbers for our sales, for our regular sales process. And we're getting, I'm getting ready to do a training, and one of the staff stops me and says, This is gonna be a rough meeting. And I was like, No, this is gonna be about gratitude. Okay, our numbers aren't as high as they were. There's a lot of shit going on in the world right now. There's a war, there's AI pressure, there's there's a lot of unrest and unhappiness with government. There's a depressed real estate market. Cut yourself some slack. So we didn't do the number we normally did. But if we complain about that, we're gonna be unhappy. I'm gonna be unhappy. And who wants to follow a leader that's unhappy and grumpy and yelling and screaming and kicking and screaming? Because can I see you're working? Fuck yeah, I can. Can I see that the not you're making the calls, you're talking to the people? Okay, then be grateful that we have business. Because the flip side of that is unhappiness. And I just gave you the list. It leads to you talking about what we're not getting. It leads to you saying, well, we're not we're not fulfilled, we're isolated, we're depressed, we don't want to work anymore. It's a wrong attitude. I have to remind myself constantly. I finish my workout every morning, I read my affirmations, and one of them is to be like, I look around my room, I think about my family and remind myself to be grateful.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

There's a recipe to not be unhappy. Do you have a recipe for those who are doom scrolling all the time to stop? Because uh, I've never met somebody that doesn't or hasn't fallen down that trap. Right. Met people who do it more than others for sure. Right. But I think you also admitting that you've done it is very important to make people feel obscene that they also are are are similar. Is it becoming self-aware that you are doing it first? Is that step one?

SPEAKER_01 5:41

That is step one. And uh I do this. Don't fucking justify it. So what we do is we realize we scroll a lot and we feel guilty, and then we justify it, and I say shit like, yeah, but it's Alex Ramosy. I love that guy. Oh, it's it's this, it's Tony Robbins. It's you know, I it's about business. And yes, a lot of my stuff is business and sports related and motivation related, but I'm be lying to you if it wasn't also full of the other junk. That's just the algorithm. You're battling the algorithm all the time. You're the algorithm generation. You're soon gonna be the AI generation. But right now, that's what you're battling. So I I would tell you like nobody responds well to stop scrolling, stop being on your phone all the time. That doesn't work. Um, as a couple, I wouldn't try that with my partner and she wouldn't try it with me. It's it's more about teaching self-awareness and being able to reflect and have conversations with the people in your circle to be like, what are you getting out of it? What is what is the get like I love my wife because she's so honest about it. I just mindlessly scrolled, wasted 45 minutes. That takes a lot of power to do that.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

Yeah, I think that's the the whole irony of this conversation is you know, is social media fully negative? Is there some positives? Because we use social media to promote this content, which I think is insanely positive to get the word out there. Um, what what are you what's your take on kind of like uh sourcing out and sticking to the positives because there's so much good information out there via these social media sites?

SPEAKER_01 7:26

There really is. Save the shit that you like, like the stuff that you like, and the stuff that lands on your page, it's not feeding your brain and not good for you. And you know it because you you feel it. It's a voice that tells you it's the universe, it's God. Somebody's saying, like, this isn't good for you, Jay. Flip that thing as fast as possible. When you let it in, it's like letting the devil into your brain. Like you just don't even take more than five or six seconds of it because if it triggers an inner voice that's like, yeah, this is probably not good for me. That's the start. The start is we loot, we drop that gate because we say shit like it's only social media, it's a video. I don't know this guy, it's not my life. Or I see the stuff that my team likes and shares and jokes about a at the lunchroom, and I'm like, I tell them on my training sessions, like, guys, girls, like, what are you doing? It's not moving your life forward, it's holding you back, and you don't see it. So if somebody that can mentor you or put their hand up and be like, it's holding you back, and then you start to become more accountable, or you start saying to yourself, yeah, I know, you already know. You can't bullshit me. I I know when it's not good for me. I can see my eight-year-old know when a video comes up on YouTube and I can hear the audio, and she looks at me, she flips it because she knows that we know.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

When you were at your rock bottom, um, you know, social media wasn't really a thing then, and you turned to books as much as you could, yeah, working out. Would you say that books are equivalent to social media content, or is one better than the other? And what should someone look for?

SPEAKER_01 9:11

Well, again, this comes down to I could have gone to the bookstore and I could have gone to the adult section and bought a book that wasn't good for me, or I could have gone to the business section or the self-help section, I could have gone to the nonfiction section, I could have gone to any section in the world. There's the there's the analogy for social media. You're standing in the social media store, you can go anywhere. You get to choose. I chose business and self-help. You can still make those choices. The algorithm still gave me all the other aisles. You just gotta be pig headed about what you choose to follow. Like it's so empowering when somebody, my kids, my older kids, or my wife says, Yeah, I unfollowed all my fitness influencers. My wife said this to me not that long ago. And I said, Oh, why? You're in the fitness. She goes to classes, she's fit because it's just feeding my head full of bullshit. Strong, right? My daughter putting passwords on time limits on social media because she's like, just wasting my time. My son's is so my oldest son's is so what I see and what he is clean, it's all sports, it's LeBron James, it's Kobe Bryant, it's inspirational stuff. It's but he still has that channel of nonsense because they share it at work. So again, think about it, it's no different than when you're in a bookstore. They still exist, I don't know, way back in the day, and you're like, well, I got all these different avenues to go down to. So your social media algorithm is the store. You've got to be pig headed about what you decide to read.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

So to circle back to the starting question, you know, we talked about the secret to unhappiness. We talked about the algorithm can get you there and just kind of figuring out or paying attention to what you want to do. So is that the underlying theme to the secret to happiness is just pay attention.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Yes, right. Words are seeds. They are going to eventually be plant spit out in your mouth. Whatever you say about yourself is a fruit you've got to eat, it's the same mentally. Whatever you're ingesting, whatever you're planting inside your head, your head, if you pictured, you closed your eyes and pictured it like a fertile ground with nice good soil, you'd be more aware of the seeds you're planting inside your brain because each one becomes a little shadow of doubt, a little bit of inspiration, a little bit of something else that can grow into something greater. I want you to focus on choosing what you feed your brain.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

Okay, so let's say I'm that individual who wants to start paying attention. What's a better idea to start adding things to my life to pay attention to or subtracting the shit in my life?

SPEAKER_01 12:02

You grow, you get more by subtracting. Because what you're not honest about is there's a shit ton of negativity or stuff you could remove that wouldn't change your life, would not be so detrimental to your life that you would miss it. I know this because I got rid of TikTok. Because I think Instagram and some other platforms have they all have their place on what they kind of deliver. And TikTok for me, for mine anyway, algorithm was a lot more time wasting and a lot less value for me than what I was able to find on. So I just got rid of it. I don't miss it. You won't either. You won't get FOMO over what somebody, someone's joke on TikTok. If it's that popular, it'll be on Instagram.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

That's always been my kind of way of living is if I want new ideas to come into my head, I've got to make room for them. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

So I've got to eliminate all that bullshit that's I would guarantee you that we all have me, myself included, probably 70% nonsense stored in your head that you could probably flush and make room for new good soil, good seeds, better fruit to eat, and a better life. Until next time, see you on the other side, buddy.