Luis Gutiérrez Rojas, a physician and PhD in Psychiatry from the University of Granada, has just presented his latest book, ‘The Beauty of Living. All Problems Have a Solution’, in which he asserts that few people will reach greater levels of happiness than those who accept themselves as they are.

How can adults accept themselves as they are, and above all, how can they help their children accept themselves as they are, if parents spend all their time telling them they should be different: more obedient, cleaner, more polite…?

There’s no magic wand to know for sure, but the truth is that to achieve happiness and stability in life, it’s necessary to accept yourself as you are. And how can we do that? The best way to get someone (child, husband, wife…) to change isn’t by telling them, “You have to change, you have to do this or that.”

That doesn’t help much. The trick is to tell people how they are; that is, what the advantages and disadvantages of their behavior are. When someone realizes and truly perceives what’s harming them, they reach a turning point. They understand that it’s in their best interest to change… but often they don’t know how and can ask for help. Therefore, it’s not so much about lecturing as it is about asking, “Hey, what do you think? What’s stopping you? How would you do it?” It’s a way to get people to love themselves and not constantly point out the negative aspects, something very common among parents with their children. When a person knows their strengths, they gain self-esteem and have a much greater capacity to face life.

Many parents want their children to be happy and shower them with treats, but when they reach adolescence, they get angry with them for being capricious; they surround them with comfort and then scold them for being lazy; they give them technological and audiovisual entertainment and, later on, blame them for not reading; they shield them from pain, but then tell them they are whiners… What are the consequences of this contradictory type of upbringing?

It’s truly a contradiction. On the one hand, we want our children’s every whim fulfilled to make them happy—they want something special, we give it to them; they want to go somewhere, we go…—but then we complain about them. These children suffer from what psychologists call a zero tolerance for frustration. When they’re frustrated, when they get a “no” for an answer, or when we tell them we’re not going to the movies… they think it’s a tragedy. How can we change this? By getting them used to deprivation, to being told “no.” It’s about telling them: figure it out yourself, call them, find out for yourself… And it would be good for them to occasionally hear “no” from their parents; that is, that what they so desperately want and long for isn’t always available to them so they don’t get used to it. In personal, professional, and family life, everyone has to manage failure, situations where things go wrong and we don’t succeed.

But it’s easy for parents, after long days at work, to prefer to avoid saying no so they don’t have to deal with the child’s tantrums, isn’t that right?

If we give in to a child’s tantrum and end up saying yes to what they want, we’re making a big mistake. Tantrums are a way for them to try to get their way. The child knows that if they make a scene, if they throw a fit, if they say it a hundred million times, eventually they’ll get what they want. But that’s something that can be taught. Just as the child has learned to get things by causing a scene, we can do the opposite by telling them, “No matter how much you scream or yell, I’m not going to give it to you.” So, do I have to constantly put up with their screaming? No. You’ll have to put up with it at first until they learn and get used to the fact that no matter how much they scream, their parents won’t give in. If parents don’t do this, the tantrums will get worse and worse, and when they reach adolescence, the young person won’t just scream, but will make threats, hurt themselves and others, run away, and display aggression. If from the beginning we teach our child that he is not in charge, that he does not dominate us, nor can he do whatever he wants with us, when he reaches adolescence, he will get along better.

In his book, he tells the reader: “If you want to be happy, don’t be empathetic.” However, this is one of the values ​​taught to children in many homes and schools. So, what’s the truth? Isn’t the opposite being selfish or uncaring?

Love is hierarchical; first comes my family, the people I love, my friends, my clients… Some people think the important thing is to put themselves in other people’s shoes, so they create an aura of affection with acquaintances and strangers that does them tremendous harm. We need to consider a healthy concept of empathy: I listen to others and help them, but I don’t take on their problems as my own. How many people suffer because of the problems of those around them, or those they see on television. I ask them a question: does your being completely broken alleviate someone else’s pain? No. It generates anguish for you and others. It serves to embitter your life and the lives of those around you. Some people simply pile up other people’s problems and, deep down, justify their own unhappiness and avoid looking inward.

In one of its chapters, it highlights that there has never been another time in human history subjected to such audiovisual tyranny, with thousands of stimuli showing people who are completely happy, and countless ideas for achieving happiness at the click of a button. Is all this making us more unhappy?

We live in a capitalist society, which has advantages and disadvantages. For example, companies are constantly bombarding us with desires, using carefully crafted neuromarketing messages to make us believe that buying a certain handbag or going to a particular restaurant will make us happier. But that’s not true. Consumerism and materialism offer only short-term satisfaction. People with a lot of money want to spend more and more because they can no longer find anything that truly satisfies them. What truly fulfills us is genuine, authentic love, being at peace with another person. The greatest satisfaction of a trip or a meal is being in the company of those we cherish. How can we turn this around? We can consider that this kind of gratification is more humane, much more pleasurable, almost hedonistic, when shared. Let’s think about what we can do for others. Our children ask us for things all the time, but why don’t we do activities or make plans as a family, something we enjoy? That strengthens family bonds.

Especially since, as the book points out, it’s common for children to receive gifts only to forget they have them after three days. Why don’t they make them happy anymore?

It’s true, the gifts from the Three Wise Men are forgotten within a week. And it’s important to point that out. Investing in family experiences is the best thing you can do. That’s why we take so many family photos, to remember those moments we enjoyed so much. These experiences shape a child’s life more than any material gift or object you might give them at a particular time.

And in relationships, why is it common to mortgage our happiness and wait for our partner to make us happy?

There are millions of theories, but we live in a world where, generally, we think that if I sacrifice a lot for the other person, it seems like I’m not thinking about myself, and if I don’t think about myself and no one else does, one becomes bitter, so in the end, the best thing is to think about oneself. Love is complete when it’s coupled with commitment. Love must be reciprocal: I give, you give, I love you and you love me, I give and I receive… and the more you give, the more you receive. There’s currently a focus on the personal: invest in yourself, love yourself, focus on yourself… That’s all well and good, but it’s of little use: nothing is more satisfying than feeling loved, and you can only feel loved if you have loved yourself first.

In these pages, he suggests that we should avoid the message “you can achieve anything you set your mind to.” Why? What other similar messages should we avoid?

We live in a society with a certain toxic positivity. There are many messages along the lines of “you can achieve anything if you try hard enough.” An Olympic gold medal is displayed to demonstrate that if you work hard in life, you’ll succeed. That’s not true. You might have won it, but there are 300 other athletes who also trained and worked hard for that medal and didn’t achieve it. We need to learn to manage failures much better and redefine the idea of ​​success. What is success? Is it getting what you want in life? The Roma have a saying: “May your dreams come true,” because when you achieve what you so desperately want, you realize it wasn’t such a big deal after all. Most human desires end up being unsatisfying. “I want to be a professor, I want to be a notary, I want to visit such and such a city…” Then, when you achieve it, you say, “Well, it wasn’t all that great after all.” So what is truly satisfying? What should we focus on? On ourselves, on being better than we are now. Success is about making the most of our talents, and that doesn’t mean we can’t achieve great things. Most people are average-achieving; geniuses are few and far between. We have to ask ourselves why we aren’t better than we were before, why we aren’t improving a weakness, why we aren’t making life more pleasant for others. That’s the key to success. So, don’t say, “You can achieve anything you set your mind to.” Focus on your strengths and limitations and set short-term goals. And enjoy the journey. You often enjoy the journey more than reaching the destination.

Its title is “The Beauty of Living.” Not everyone has an easy life. What would you say to all those people who, especially since the pandemic, feel unhappy, depressed, and even have lost the will to live?

I’m surrounded by young people at the university, and you can see there’s a certain undercurrent of sadness and dissatisfaction. In my book, when I refer to the beauty of living, I’m not saying that life is beautiful and wonderful; what I mean is that the “B” side, the one beneath the surface, the suffering and sacrifice, is also part of life. And it’s precisely when you face something difficult, when you alleviate the suffering of others, that you feel a lasting satisfaction, especially when the journey has been challenging.

I would tell them to stop complaining, to stop saying the problem is outside, to stop blaming the government, climate change… and think about yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, and reflect on what you want to do with your life. When I ask my students what they want to do with their lives, they answer: well, I don’t know, we’ll see, well, it depends, let’s see if I get lucky… We have to abandon this passive attitude and replace it with a more active one. I know that the most optimistic people, those who complain less, are those who don’t have time to complain because they have a plan and they are following it; that’s the key to motivation. If I, as a doctor, am focused on being better, on further training, on learning about new research… I will stop complaining about how bad the healthcare system is or how little doctors are valued. That’s the mindset of those who don’t want to prosper. Think about yourself, about what you can improve, and take action.