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I think everyone wants to be happy. I’ve never heard anyone say they want to live a miserable life. One of the reasons we seek to know ourselves is to actually achieve this happiness. So, what does happiness mean to us? Today, we will ask ourselves questions about happiness.
How do you define happiness? What comes to mind when you think about happiness?
Is happiness a goal for you, something you can achieve?
Is happiness a priority in your life, something you actively pursue?
Photo by Yuyeung Lau on Unsplash
The same thing applies to everything we want in life. If we want to achieve something, we must first define it well, understand it well, and think about how to achieve it. The same is true for happiness.
To be happy, we must first think about what happiness means to us. For some people, it is their possessions and money; for others, it is friendship, watching a good movie, reading a good book, or drinking a delicious coffee at a cafe.
I think happiness should not be a goal. Happiness is more of a moment lived, the pleasure felt. When we tie happiness to material or reduce it to “things owned,” I feel like we are mortgaging the moments we could be happy. This includes goals such as “having a good social circle,” “having a good job,” and “having a good family.” Happiness should not be something fought for, worked for, or strived for. If it were, there would be very few happy people in the world.
Here is the importance of knowing yourself. To give an example from the pandemic period, we all witnessed how people went into depression when they were left alone. The connection with the environment was not just a physical connection. It was also the happiness bond with the outside world. The severance of this bond pushed people into depression and loneliness that they had never experienced before. On the other hand, people who knew themselves, had high self-confidence and awareness, enjoyed the advantage of being able to be happy with small things, think positively, and create happiness for themselves.
I prefer to look at this question differently. Why am I not thinking about happiness when I am happy?
The biggest reason for this is that we are enjoying that moment at that time and not comparing it to the bad things going on in our lives. So, happiness is actually something that arises when we stop thinking about all kinds of expectations, comparisons, goals, and desires. In other words, when we enjoy the moment.
Based on this, we can say that happiness is actually accepting the past as it is (we talked about this in previous articles), and thinking positively about the future but not having expectations. Otherwise, it is quite easy to live every moment of our lives by poisoning ourselves.
