In pursuit of happiness

Human beings pursuit for happiness has been eternal. Search the internet and you will find thousand advices that are suppose to make you happy, from buying a cat to donating an organ. Obviously it is something that is damn important to us. But, like the Holy Grail, the search has eluded us. Why is it so important to us? What make us happy?

Web defines happiness as “state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy”. I know this definition is open to a debate, let’s just pretend it is true. Why is it important? If we were not happy eaters we would have starved to death, if we were not happy fuckers we would have died long before killing the beautiful dodo birds. Happiness is the reason we are alive. Nature is smart and it wants life to survive for its own survival; and thus the program of happiness is installed in our brain.

While small wonders like a child’s smile, pleasant weather, a birds song, the snow capped peak, the green forest, the blue sky, food, beer and sex, can make us happy, we somehow end up confusing ourselves asking the question, ‘what makes us happy?’. Even the religions that guarantee happiness have no unique solution.

The ancient philosophies of Asia declared renouncing materialism makes one happy. Try poverty when you have hungry mouths to feed. The medieval philosophy of West and ‘Middle-West’ (I prefer it to the term Middle-East) goes one step further and proclaims that our life is a result of sin. Death is the only way to happiness. That idea is definitely not for me. After the Renaissance people started to reject the idea of being controlled by an invisible force and started to believe in their free-will. Individualistic happiness gained importance. As economies of countries grew stronger, materialistic happiness ruled the mind. The new model for strong economy was to spend more. So you had loans and credit cards along with the luring malls to make you happy. More the money rotates, more the bubble grows. But the bubble had to burst, and it did. The global economy is now in tatters. The irony is that, now we are back to the old philosophy of renouncing materialism to be happy. ‘Let’s go green’, ‘let’s go back to nature’ is suddenly the ‘in thing’.

We, human beings, are brilliant in complicating simple things. Our carvings for happiness have ended up making us unhappy. We forgot that happiness is a state of mind and mind is never stable. A stable mind is a stagnant mind. An active mind has phases like the moon – from happiness to sadness and back again. But it isn’t necessarily symmetric. The phase that stays longer in your life fills your life.

Science has finally found the pill that fills your life with happiness. The secret pill they called ‘Love’. As if we are supposed to be surprised. People who are in a stable+happy+long relationship are the people who are happy. Love can even erase unhappy childhood memories. And even sometimes replace them with happy ones. Altered reality makes you unknowingly lie about your past. But then lying isn’t a bad thing when it makes you happy without harming anyone. People in love also live longer and healthier. For all those who thought love is overrated, science is here to prove you wrong. Come fall in love, and there is no better season for it than winter.

Cheers to happy life.

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Let’s live. Let’s laugh. Let’s fly.