Those are some very interesting dots because they represent different things for different people. For some it’s a fat bank account, for others it’s a walk into the nature. Happiness is a journey, a destination and a forbidden word. It’s everything and nothing. For some it’s sweat and pain towards something whilst for others it’s avoiding them.
You see, we’re all hungry for happiness and sometimes we don’t even know what that is. We see some things at other people and we see that they might seem happy, and that increases our hunger. But is it really that what we want? Are we in a search for the things that make others happy because we think they’ll have the same effect on us? We might end up in the having point.
I wonder a lot about this happiness “thing” since it causes so many problems for so many people. I might even say that the negative emotions are not even negative. It might be just a lack of happiness. So what are we actually in a search for? I guess we just want to feel good about ourselves and about our life regardless what can bring that. The things we do or we say are actually oriented to make ourselves feel good or to avoid making things bad, which is still good (in the first month after this blog’s creation, I came up with a “theory” called the pleasure and fear theory, which is based on the idea that we’re in a search for pleasure or we’re in a search to avoid punishment.)
If we go deeper, we’ll realize that we see happiness as a destination. How many times you’ve told yourself “I’ll be happy when…”? But what is actually stopping us from being happy right now? And as always, the answer is our perspective. Yes, people die, banks take homes, diseases kick in and s*it like that, but why should pain eliminate happiness? It’s normal to cry and it’s normal to laugh. Maybe we all need a default state of being grateful that nothing worse happened and I’m sure you know that it can always be worse.
Maybe we’re “not allowed” to be happy because we continuously compare ourselves with people that don’t have the problems we have. However, they probably have other problems. Everybody has problems and that’s one of the few things that last forever. But who wants problems? No one… and still… everybody has those.
For you happiness is…?