Dear Hivers,
Are you happy in life?
I asked this not so go-to question to two of my close friends and here's how they reacted:
My friend Rishav says he is happy only when he's gaming.
My friend Sanjana says she thinks nobody can stay happy all the time and that we need to embrace happiness and sadness both as parts of our life.
Ikr, girls have mature answers!
More or less my friends are talking about temporary 'happiness'.
So before moving further, I want to ask you what happiness is to you.
If you are into memes, you must have read these lines before - "Happiness is, not having to set an alarm for the next day" or "Happiness is listening to a song that correctly explains your mood at that time" etc. We do relate and share these kinds of memes.
Well, this "happiness" is temporary. They termed it Pleasure.
Happiness to me is far more of a permanent state of mind. Anything that is temporary is only pleasure. Happiness is kind of a long lasting concept. Pleasure gives joy for a moment of time. Like going on vacation with loved ones is an example of pleasures. Again Pleasure can also have numerous types.
You must have heard about people planning to go to The Himalayas to look for peace so they get happiness. Even some of my friends say so sometimes. But I think it's the most far that one can go searching for happiness. Happiness is an internal state of mind. It's a brain game. Brain dictates what should make us happy and what should not. Brain is part of our body, and not that we are a part of the brain.
And stop the brain telling us what to be happy out of?
Brain has the long past information of our preferences. In a way, brain opposes us to accept new behaviors. So we must hone the art of unlearning things, if we really want to take control of making us happy or unhappy from the brain.
Another reason which I think makes us unhappy is our failed tries of multi-tasking. This one is my personal experience too.
Source
Whenever I have opened multiple tabs in my brain browser, it has given me negative results most of the time. Even for a second, if I minus the success and failure part, I found that the process only puts me in stress, which is unnecessary if I solve priority issues. With saying that, I am not trying to restrict your dimension of things you do that works best for you.
In my last blog I told you that now I am a student of Population Science. I get to read a lot of global reports and make presentations doing critical assessments as part of our graded assignments. Recently, I looked for the "World Happiness Report 2022", published by UN. I read this in the 1st line in "Data and Methodology" section ( Page no. 133, World Happiness Report 2022)
Happiness research has tended to be Western -centric, as discussed above, and even when the analyses are international, such as the Gallup World Poll – the metrics used could still be regarded as influenced by Western norms and values.
The report itself says that biasness is there in the report. If a global level report funded by UN can have biasness or unsolved glitch in the idea of happiness, it's normal for us to get confused. Please read the report if you are interested. I really don't want to bother your light read in this post.
If I try to summarize and you allow only one sentence, I would say It's never too late to change your ideas for better results.
Thanks,
Sagar
