What is HAPPINESS

HAPPINESS

What is happiness? We can say happiness is this that but in terms of life, your life energies are happening in a more exuberant way than it normally happens. Depression means your life energies have become very low and stayed. Happiness means your life energies are exuberant. There are many ways of describing happiness, but only those who are happy know what it means to be happy. There is nobody who has not been happy. Everybody's been happy but the problem is they're not able to maintain it. That's all, isn't it? Everybody's been happy.  In the last 24 hours, how many moments of joy have you known? One,two,three - how many? May be you can count on your fingers. Many people have nothing to count. (Laughs) When you were five years of age, a child, how many moments of joy did you know in 24 hours? Hmm ? Lots of them, isn't it? Somebody had to make you unhappy.

Now somebody has to make you happy, isn't it? The whole equation has gotten reversed somehow. All this effort of life, everything that you did, education, career, business, family, whatever you did, everything was in pursuit of happiness, is it so? Everything that humanity has done on this planet is in pursuit of happiness, is it so? In the last hundred years, we have done too much on this planet. With the use of science and technology, we have changed the very face of this planet. Today, we have the kind of comforts and conveniences that no other generation could ever even imagine. Yes?

What royalty could not afford a hundred years ago, today average citizens have, isn't it so? Aren't most of you driving chariots with hundred, two hundred horses? Yes? Even Kings could not afford this. But are we any happier? We are definitely the most comfortable generation ever on this planet. Is it so, physically? But are we also the most joyful generation? So it's not worked. Science and technology has brought enormous amount of comfort and convenience to our lives. Things that we could not imagine just 25 years ago are just a living reality today, isn't it? But are we any more joyful? No.

 And all these comforts and conveniences have not come easy. They've come at a tremendous cost to every other life on this planet. Yes? Every creature from plant to animal to everything including human beings, have paid an enormous price to create these comforts and conveniences and we are not even happy. What is the point? We are literally making a bonfire of this planet. If you are ecstatic, it's okay, burn the planet. It's alright. We are not even happy. I think it's time to really look at it, isn't it? Why are we burning it up, if you're not even happy?

 

I think happiness is a pretty complicated concept that has to do with pleasure on one hand but has to do with broader meaning, also. We know that there is a whole spectrum of positive state that one wants to attain that is much more nuanced than the word 'happiness' would imply. It seems to me that happiness is some blend of experience of pleasure and the experience of meaning and fulfillment in life. 

And, I think much more of the latter than the former. For me, staying in my own lane, not being comparative to others, my peers that could have more than me or less than me. That is when I'm the most happy, when I'm in my own lane. Happiness is something more long term. I could sensibly ask you if you're happy with your day or happy with your life. Pleasure is short term. Pleasure is an experience that could last 10 seconds, 20 seconds, a minute. A sip of wine, it could be hearing a joke, being hugged, watching your child laugh. If you want to define happiness in any big picture way you really want to be focusing more on what gives life meaning and purpose than you do on the moment to moment little jolts of joy you might get.

 Happiness to me before I went in mild depression a few months ago meant something very different to me. Happiness back then was about achieving these big milestones: graduating from college, getting the right kind of job. Now, happiness to me is about the mundane every day, little things in my life. We know a lot about the things that are associated with high life satisfaction. By far the most important is your relationships with other people. There's kind of fleeting happiness, the kinds of little buzzes you get from eating an awesome ice cream sundae. But, to me the real happiness, what I would call joy, is that deep connection you get with somebody else. That's happiness.