Be happy: Good or Terrible Advice?

Happiness is like finding something that makes everything super easy for life. We all just want to be happy because it seems like people who are always happy, found permanent inner peace. But the problem with happiness is, it doesn’t stay permanent.

How do you “be happy”?

Or, In other words, how do you get happiness? What makes you happy? 

Now I can’t answer these questions for you. Because clearly, they’ll differ from people to people. I can only answer for myself. Like, I find happiness when I do something that scares me, I find happiness by sharing my thinking with all of you. Sometimes I find happiness by just surfing the web, and sometimes I find happiness in serenity. Again sometimes I find it among other people. 

The point is, happiness may come from any type of situation. Happiness is an emotion. And just like all other emotions, it gets triggered by a cue, a situation. So, the same thing or situation can trigger one’s happiness, but another person may not feel anything happy at all. Just because it is like other emotions, it is related to our belief system, what we believe, how we perceive ourselves. Our values dictate how we perceive our own happiness. That’s why, a competitive kid from high-school gets sad when scoring 98 instead of a perfect 100, or the most popular guy in the college gets mad when a girl rejects his charm. It’s like an indicator of our values. If we work according to our value-system, we will get happiness. If we fail to do that, we don’t get happiness. That simple!

Is “Being Happy” really that simple?

But this simple thing gets complicated. Because our values change throughout our lives, what we think our values are not normally the real values we really have. On the other hand, because happiness is just an emotion, it’ll fade like any other emotion. So, even if you do something as your value dictates, you can’t be happy all the time. For example, I personally used to believe that my value is popularity and coolness. I believed that if I showed the world how cool I was, I might be happy all the time. I tried and technically “learned” some cool stuff to show coolness too, but I was never happy. Rather 90% of the time, I was anxious, jealous or sad.

I realized that, no matter how much I try to become cool, I can’t be happy. Not because being popular won’t grant you happiness, but because being popular wasn’t my value, to begin with. On the other hand, even though in some situations, getting public attention gave me some good feelings, they would fade soon. That’s how any emotion works. They will come and then they will go. Nobody can actually be in a happy state forever.

Finally

In the end, that is the problem of happiness. No matter how much u try to achieve happiness by doing something that you believe will give u happiness, you won’t be happy all the time. The solution might be that you are focusing on the wrong value, but to be perfectly honest, even that won’t make you happy all the time. 

Life is too complicated to find the ultimate happiness equation.