In Pursuit of Happiness

I caught a video on TEDtalks the other night courtesy of recommendation of colleagues. It was a video by Shawn Achor (video embedded below) and he talked about the Science of Happiness. A lot of what he said struck a strong chord with me and it got me reflecting on how we lead our lives and how society seems to be influencing the way we lead it.

What is our definition of happiness? To me, happiness is just an ideal that in today’s society is impossible to achieve. This is simply because whenever we reach the end point of what we thought true happiness is going to be like, we shift that goal upwards and work towards another level of happiness without really cherishing what we have achieved. So as a result, we are never truly happy because we keep working towards a goal which is essentially a moving target.

This coupled with the fact that our brains are naturally wired to see the negativity in things before the positives amplifies the fact that we will never be happy with whatever we get. It is also so much easier to judge a person by identifying his flaws first until the person proves his positive side. This is the way that we live in and it is no wonder that there are more and more people killing themselves over problems which they never knew could bring them down.

What do we tie back happiness to? Do we tie it back to career success? Do we tie it back to how much money we make? Or do we tie it back to how many friends we have? Some of us have passions and it is passion for things that keep us going to keep us happy. Social interactions with people makes people feel connected, and that keeps us happy knowing that we are not alone. So is doing the things we have passion for with the people who matter, all that it takes for us to achieve happiness? In most cases yes, but like I said before, we behave in such a way that the end goal to things is essentially a moving target.

Without this mindset in place though, we will never know what our true potential is. It is with this mindset in place that we challenge ourselves to reach the next level of things. It is supposed to be a good thing right? Question is, how we put an upper limit to that and say that we have achieved enough for now and sit to soak in our own success story and “happiness”. Can we be satisfied with whatever little that we have as and when we achieve it?

Life is all about balances and as cliché as it sounds; too much of something is never going to be good for you. Same applies to our pursuit of happiness. When we get too obsessed with going for something and keep changing the finishing line of what we thought could be true happiness, and until we choose to stop this mentality, we will never be too happy. The brain plays a very strong part in influencing any kind of decisions or the way we react towards things when they happen. We are what we tell ourselves to be. What makes you happy eventually?