What is your trick to sustain happiness?
“If you can ask one question to your 50-year-old self from the future, what would you ask?”, asked someone to me. I said I would ask, “Are you ok?”.
Living is miserable.
We are confined by the social construct which becomes burdensome when not understood or when not comprehensible. We do our best to ensure a favorable or a neutral outcome in everything so there is no need to mull over sense and logic.
Ensuring a favorable outcome could mean employing self-righteousness to shut down any conversation to avoid undesirable deviations or manipulation to lure the other person into your decision. Ensuring a neutral outcome could mean employing a sacrificing or a victim mentality.
It could be very stressful either way to carry on this way without breaking into hopelessness and exhaustion. There would be small wins that might seem to tell us that we are doing the right thing.
Our definition of happiness gets tailored around these small wins that feel good at the moment but pass quickly.
Happiness is a chameleon that can quickly turn into another feeling if not found with a reason.
We are all chasing happiness — whatever that means to us. To some its accomplishment, to some its pride, to some its oneness, and to some its prosperity. None of these is a better definition than the other. Yet there are smaller scales of happiness that could make a larger impact sometimes.
Ironically, pursuing sadness in current affairs or in memory seems to keep self sane and grounded to enjoy the subtle shades of hope, joy, friendship, and love. This happiness seems to stay. The compulsive or urgent happiness that we bring upon ourselves by the instantly rewarding expressions or behaviors, somehow dies quickly, sometimes even turning into guilt and regret.
The grey areas are where happiness hides.
Yet there is a rush to find happiness on the surface. A hearty cry feels better after than instant laughter. Meeting an old friend or listening to songs from our childhood and adolescence kindles a feeling of loss and makes us reminisce in the fond memories with a helpless sadness knowing that they are and have to be in the past. This miserable state feels heavy in the heart yet soothing.
The anxiety and suspense that accompany the beginning of anything new, be it a relationship or a venture feels blissful. The vast expanse of quiet, pure, and scenic nature feels disturbingly lonely yet peaceful. Disagreement and difficult discussions are painful. But the change of mind that is accomplished as a result is satisfying.
Happiness needs failing, risking, struggling, trusting, being uncomfortable, and vulnerable. Life is thus a misery leading us to find happiness; only if we are looking in the right place.
