widener

“Every man (person) wants to be happy, but in order to be so he (she) needs first to understand what happiness is.�
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I decided to write a blog about something a bit different, meaning something other than Widener or about myself directly. I stumbled across this quote the other day and found it quite intriguing. And I started to think. What is happiness? It is this “thing� that we all strive to achieve but we never seem to find a definite thing to hold onto.

According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary happiness is “a state of well-being and contentment.� I believe this definition is pretty universal. Not too many people would define happiness as a state of chaos or disequilibrium. The next logical step would seem to be how does one obtain a state of well-being/contentment? This is very individual to whoever is asking the question. For a homeless person happiness may be getting a hot meal in a heated building, while happiness for a college student maybe be if the cafeteria serves tomato soup and grilled cheese on the same day. What makes one person happy may just be every day boring life for someone else. In this blog post I will not obviously be able to answer the question of how does one obtain happiness but I will certainly write down some of the conclusions/ideas that I have come up with. Like I said this post is meant to be something different from the usual stuff I post.

If happiness is something that is relative to the individual one must find happiness for them self. No one else can find it for them. This is not to say people can’t become an “asset� or a guide to help one discover happiness but ultimately one has to find it for themselves. This is similar to learning. A professor can explain the material or concept but ultimately the student has to understand it for themselves.

The first conclusion I have come to is happiness is all around you and you just have to look for it more closely. I have heard this other places too. This theory suggests that an individual is unhappy because they spend a lot of time focusing on negatives and not so much on all the many positive aspects of their life. There is a saying you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. I propose that by appreciating what you’ve got now you won’t miss it so much when it’s gone. And when it is gone you will still have many aspects of life to appreciate. If we could bring our awareness to the many things we take for granted our minds would probably overwhelmed with things that make our life easier and we could not appreciate everything in our life. If every day we could appreciate one object/aspect of our life that we usually pass over and forget about every day could one increase their perceived level of happiness? I believe it is possible. For example if you buy or drink coffee every day in the morning just to get out of your house and make it to school or work try appreciating all that this warm caffeinated beverage does for you. I know many people who could not function without it. Some aspects of coffee that one could contemplate would be its warming effect on a cold day or its bold flavor. Another example is if a person helps you, say thank you and maybe tell them why you are grateful for their help. These acts will most likely make their day better and I believe will improve yours as well. There is a Buddhist quote that explains this idea.

“Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
-Buddha

What is the harm in brightening someone else’s day, I don’t see any harm.
Another idea that I had was that maybe happiness is an illusion created by humans to provide a reason for life. Many of the goals we set are goals that we hope will make us or bring us happiness. For example someone might say “oh if I could get that raise or that job I would be happy� but me and you both know that once they got that raise or job they wouldn’t be happy for long. They would realize there are just as many problems being rich or having a new job as they had before the raise or new career. As humans we become quickly discontented with the current situation in our life and make changes to improve or alter our lives. By setting some unobtainable illusion that everyone strives for we bring meaning behind many of our actions. Could this illusion be necessary for sustained human life? I don’t know for sure. What would we do if happiness didn’t exist in our mind? What would exist in its place? Contentment? Blissfulness? Again I don’t know.

The third conclusion is kind of based off the second theory I have. If we assume happiness is an illusion we can create a more real definition of happiness. Using the definition from Merriam-Webster “a state of well-being and contentment.� Maybe happiness should be realizing that this definition of happiness is unobtainable on the long term obvious we can feel content or in a state of well-being in a short term basis. I am only 20 so I don’t have a lot of life experience to justify believing that long term states of well being are hard/impossible to obtain but I believe it could be possible subscribing to this theory of re-defining happiness. If you re-define happiness to something obtainable couldn’t one be happy for a long time? A “re-definition� could be something more encompassing to the reality of life. Maybe happiness could be “being alive and experiencing the ups and downs of life.� I guess this kind of combines the previous two theories that I suggested. We all know that life is not always perfect so why not accept this fact instead of trying to fight it all the time. If we accept that not everything works out the way we want it too wouldn’t that make life so much easier when things don’t go perfectly. Maybe if we could step back and say hey this feeling/event is not so great right now but I’m going to keep trying and stick with it because this is only a temporary feeling or event; just like everything else in life. Accepting the inevitable could be the first step to finding happiness.