Right from my childhood, I have been so curious about how to find happiness and its different sources. We devote our entire life to be happy and everything we do in our life is a quest for happiness. I always wonder how we could find the real happiness in life and is there something called ultimate happiness. If so, then what does it really mean, how could we achieve it, can we create it by our self and is it transferable. These questions always bother me even now.
At every critical juncture of my life, I always thought why this so called “Happiness” is not entertaining my life. What is lacking in me? Is it a good job, a beautiful girl friend or enormous wealth? What exactly could help me to find this wonderful feeling?
Like many other people I also started thinking about what creates the habitat of happiness? While travelling, while having shower, while sitting alone, before going to bed, I started to think vigorously about it, because I really wanted to find it. Unfortunately all these make my life so complicated that I couldn’t find a proper answer to it. I know it’s very sad. When I started thinking about it very seriously, at first, I thought when we achieved our aim in life then we may feel the happiness. If that is the ultimate path to happiness then rich people or people who achieved everything in life are so happy in their life… but are they really happy?
So what exactly creates happiness? Is it “Everything” or “Nothing”? What do you think? It’s tough to decide, isn’t it? But I have to find it because I want to succeed in my life and without happiness, I think it’s impossible. Then I decided to read and search for articles related to this and I found so many articles talking about ‘’what is happiness’’ and how to find it. I don’t know whether the authors’ of these articles are happy in their life?
What do you have to get in order to be happy? I am going to summarize certain findings of my research. The first and the most important thing is “There is nothing you have to get, do or be in order to be happy. In fact happiness is our init nature”. If happiness is our init nature then how come I am not experiencing it? Well, the answer for that is quite simple. We are spending our entire life learning to be unhappy. That means we are learning a ‘mental model’ from our childhood days, a notion about the way the world works on various things such as how to find a better job, how to live, how to go out for party and so on. But the truth is we don’t know about this ‘mental model’ instead we think that this is how the world works.
So what is this ‘mental model’? In short “To get something, we have to do something, only then we can be something”. Yes this is the model we always think that makes happiness in life and we use “if-then” clause for that to work e.g. If I got my dream job, I would be the happiest man in this world, if I have a girl friend; I would go on holidays so on and so forth. Think about our life ten years ago. We had so many “if-then” clauses in our life and many of those things are there with us right now? Still we are not happy? So what is the reason for being unhappy in life? Well, Well, Well … again it is getting complicated. The answer for not being happy is just because we human beings changes our “If –then” clauses continuously during the period of time.
We spend all our time investing on this “if –then” model and we invest so much in the outcome of this model. But the truth is the actions which we do to achieve something in our life is in our control but the outcome is not within our control. The outcomes may not be the same as we always expect. But we invest so much of effort in outcomes and we want things to be happening the way we wish…. that may be something we learn from the model and if it is not the expected outcome, then we would say “life sucks”.
The best way to overcome this is to invest in the process, instead of the outcome. We can focus on the outcome, that gives direction but investing on the outcome is a sure recipe for failure.
Happiness is not about having what you want instead, it’s about wanting what you have (gratitude) (Real enjoyment of living by Hyman Judah Schachtel).
Happiness = wanting what you have ∕ having what you want
Please add your valuable points about how to find happiness after reading this article.
Reference
1. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
2. Real enjoyment of living by Hyman Judah Schachtel
