Monday, January 3, 2011

Happiness

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

-Theodore Roosevelt.


In my New Years Day blog post, I wrote that one of my resolutions is to find happiness, and to keep it. When I first established it, my mindset was this: "Okay, I can handle this. I know I can achieve this resolution, in fact I more or less have done it already. This, I can handle." Upon first reading it, it makes sense. Find, have, and share happiness. Easy. But the concept of "keeping" happiness is a volatile one. Keeping anything is (much) harder than first establishing it.

Think of how long it takes to construct a building. Time and energy are expended to a pretty big extent. Well, one bulldozer and one day is what it takes to bring it down like it never existed. Think of a job interview. You are evaluated with a couple of questions to ascertain if you can do the job required of you or not. But, it's not until you actually start working and potentially mess up until they see your true capabilities, and revoke your position. Think of how it might only take one negative hiccup in your day to throw a monkey wrench in your mood.

The moral of this post that I want to make is this: Happiness is relative. You are only as happy as you want to be, and at the same time, you will lose that happiness to the degree that you let it happen. Nobody on this planet is entitled to be happier than you are, for any reason. Yes, there are people set for life and well-off in healthy environments, but we are all human. We all react similarly to different things. The rich might only find happiness in  things very unrelated to money. Same goes for the people with little money. What's important is allowing yourself to experience the maximum happiness with what you have.

Everyone has bad days. They're like a disease. They infect you, change your mood, make you liable to spread them to others, and sometimes won't go away unless you just wait it out. Bad days just happen. It is up to you decide how low they bring you down. A building might fall down, but you can rebuild it. You might lose your job, but you can find another. You can shrug it off.

Think like a hedonist. For those of you who don't know, hedonism is the concept that all end results, rewards, possessions, gifts, and any other possible thing in life eventually boils down to one intrinsic value: happiness. (Granted, happiness isn't exactly easy to measure, but you can kind of assign "happiness levels" to different things in your life) Your car has value equal to how much happiness it gives you. Your breakfast is valuable only to the extent that it makes you happy. Now, why am I saying think like a hedonist?

You will be better off. Do things based on how happy you want to be in the end. Do things for others based on how happy those actions will make you. Your whole way of life will be oriented around one simple goal, one that you can strive for every day. Finding happiness will be a normal occurrence. And the best part is that you don't need to have anything in order to do this. You just need to go about life looking for a reason to put a smile on your face, and share it with someone else. "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

My goal is not to tell people how to live. But I do think all advice is good advice. And my advice to you is to try and be as happy as possible. Sadness can be a thing of the past if you make it. You only live through life once - I say you should be happy as you live it.

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