Happiness- What is it?

Happiness. What is it? How can we experience it? Is it tangible? Can we get it delivered like any product off Amazon? And if we do, can we keep it with us forever?

Happiness in life, is something that everyone strives for. Everything that we do, we do to eventually make ourselves or the people we love, happy. Sometimes, eating the last piece of pizza can make us immensely happy. Or even having ice-cream on the couch while watching a movie at 1 am can make us happy. But at other times the same things can also mean nothing special. So how can we really find happiness?

Well, for starters, materialistic happiness lasts only for a while. That pizza is going to get finished. That ice-cream will not be there forever. No matter how much money we have, how much power we have, we can not have eternal happiness. At least not from anything materialistic. We can get pleasure from these things, great pleasure at times. But not true happiness. So what is true happiness?

Well, Wikipedia defines happiness as “positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy“. I like to think more on the lines of fulfillment than contentment/joy. For me, happiness is something that makes you fill fulfilled. For then, you can have a bad day or two, but if you are fulfilled internally with whatever it is that you are doing with your life, then you have found happiness. This can mean different things for different people.

For someone it can mean, living at the beach with the love of his life, getting by with 3 part time jobs while making no future planning whatsoever. For someone else, it can be about climbing the corporate ladder and getting to the top of his field. There’s no set template for finding happiness, because we all are different. And we all want different things from our lives. I like to see it as something like this. Imagine yourself at the end of your day, in front of the mirror. Have a real hard look at yourself and ask- “Would I change the way I’m living my life at the moment?” If the answer is no, congratulations. You’ve found true happiness.

One paragraph that I always go back to when I think about happiness is the following:

Happiness is not dependent on anything without, but more so within. We try so hard about changing whatever it is that is going on in the outside world, but sometimes even after getting to where it is that we’ve always wanted to go, it feels like we have missed out on something. Life is like a river. It flows every second and it doesn’t stay around for anybody. So it’s better to ride along, than to protest the flow of it. Find whatever it is that you truly want inside your heart, and do it for as long as you can. For we do not know how much time we have in this world, and it’s better to be happy and dead at sixty, than be living sad and alive at a hundred.

SRD.