Let’s be honest, we all want to know how to cultivate a happy fortune, don’t we? I’ve spent years reading, experimenting, and frankly, overthinking this very question. It’s a pursuit that feels both deeply personal and universally shared. I used to think it was all about grand gestures and life-altering decisions, but I’ve come to realize it’s more like tending a garden—a series of practical, daily steps. It’s funny how you can find metaphors for this in unexpected places. Just the other day, I was reflecting on a video game expansion I finished, Claws of Awaji. On the surface, it’s an action-adventure story. The protagonist, Naoe, finally gets a lead on her missing mother and races to the island of Awaji with her ally Yasuke. They find her mother alive, but captured. The captor is the daughter of a Templar agent Yasuke had defeated, a woman who inherited her father’s vengeful mission and has been holding Naoe’s mother for over a decade, torturing her to find a hidden artifact. What struck me wasn’t the conflict, but the profound stagnation. Here was a character, the Templar, whose entire sense of purpose and “fortune” was built on a foundation of inherited pain and a single-minded, corrosive goal. Her pursuit wasn’t cultivating joy; it was perpetuating misery, trapping both her prisoner and herself in a cycle that lasted more than ten years. It was a stark reminder that the first, and perhaps most crucial, step toward lasting joy is to audit the narratives we’ve inherited or built our lives upon. Are they leading us toward light, or are they keeping us, and others, in a form of emotional captivity?
So, my first practical step is always this: interrogate your quest. What are you really chasing? Is it your goal, or someone else’s ghost? In the game, the Templar’s goal was a MacGuffin, a hollow object she believed would bring meaning. In our lives, it can be a job title, a salary figure, a certain lifestyle plastered all over social media. Lasting joy rarely lives there. For me, it meant stepping away from the relentless “hustle” culture I was immersed in. I tracked my time for a month and found I was spending nearly 70 hours a week on work and work-adjacent anxiety, but only about 2 hours on things that genuinely made me feel calm and connected. The data was ugly but necessary. The second step is to actively nurture your connections. Naoe’s entire journey was driven by the foundational love for her mother. Our social bonds are the bedrock of a happy fortune. This isn’t just about grand reunions; it’s the small, consistent deposits of kindness and presence. Send that text. Have that coffee. Listen without immediately thinking of your reply.
This leads me to the third and fourth steps: practice deliberate gratitude and embrace purposeful action. Gratitude isn’t a passive feeling; it’s an active lens. I keep a simple journal—not every day, but most—and jot down three specific things. Some days it’s “the way the sun hit my desk at 4 PM,” others it’s “finally understanding that tricky concept.” This practice, which takes maybe 90 seconds, fundamentally rewires your attention toward abundance. Purposeful action is its partner. It’s about agency. Naoe and Yasuke didn’t just wish for a solution; they sailed to Awaji and confronted the problem. In our lives, it might be signing up for that class, having that difficult conversation, or starting a small creative project. Action combats the helplessness that erodes joy. I decided to learn basic woodworking last year. My first shelf was lopsided, arguably a safety hazard, but the process of creating something with my hands, of failing and adjusting, brought a tangible satisfaction no passive consumption ever could.
Now, let’s talk about resilience, which is my fifth step. Lasting joy isn’t the absence of setbacks; it’s the toolkit to navigate them. The decade of suffering endured by Naoe’s mother is an extreme metaphor for our own periods of struggle. Cultivating a happy fortune requires building emotional and practical shock absorbers. For me, this meant creating a “mental health first-aid kit”: a list of people to call, a playlist of songs that ground me, a few go-to walks, and permission to not be okay for a bit. The sixth step is curiosity over judgment. This is a big one. When we judge ourselves or our circumstances harshly, we contract. When we get curious—“Why does this trigger me?” “What’s another way to look at this?”—we expand. I’ve applied this to my own frustrations, even with media I consume. While Claws of Awaji was a decent expansion with solid mechanics, I found myself curiously detached from the Templar villain’s motivation. It felt like a recycled vengeance plot, and that curiosity about narrative choices, rather than simple criticism, made the experience more engaging and less disappointing.
Finally, the seventh step: define your own treasure. What is your MacGuffin? Is it truly valuable, or just a shiny distraction? In the end, for Naoe, the real treasure wasn’t the third artifact; it was the hope of family reunion and closure. For us, a happy fortune is rarely a single trophy. It’s a composite feeling—of peace, connection, growth, and contribution. It’s knowing that your daily actions, however small, are aligned with a deeper sense of what matters to you. I don’t have it all figured out. Some weeks I backslide into old, frantic patterns. But by returning to these seven practical steps—auditing my narrative, nurturing connections, practicing gratitude, taking purposeful action, building resilience, choosing curiosity, and redefining my treasure—I find my way back. Cultivating a happy fortune is a lifelong, imperfect, and deeply rewarding practice. It’s the antithesis of a decade-long torture chamber of spite; it’s the daily, gentle cultivation of a garden where joy, not just fleeting pleasure, can take root and last.