How We Define Happiness

I have been in deep thought over past few days and, it has troubled me deeply, making me a frustrated soul over the past few weeks. I have pondered about it deeply, each day, to the point of overthinking about it, and about each and everything present in my life. While this may feel as a very thoughtful thing to do, all it did was to prolong my agony and make me more miserable. It came to the point where I wanted to be away from everyone, since each and every word or any action whatsoever by anyone, would only serve to disturb me further making me repeat the cycle of being miserable. I spent days and nights worried about the future; and disregarded the present.

All this while, it never occurred to me, all the good things I did, and I lost the motivation to work upon things that delighted me. This happened in such a fashion, that I could no longer do as I pleased to; and I wanted to just avoid any type of contact, wilfully wasting away for days. The same things that I once worked upon as passion to me, meant little to me, just because I had little or no motivation to accomplish them. Each day, I’d spend some amount of time savouring the little motivation I had left, thinking about things I needed to do to create better days ahead of me, but then the next day, I spent whole time being lethargic, and doing absolutely nothing positive. All throughout the day, I was left so demotivated, often fueled by the flames of over thinking; and nights were spent accusing myself of not doing anything worthwhile for myself.

And this is a very taxing stage, you will appear to be doing nothing, for you wouldn’t be doing anything worthwhile, but a look closer and you’ll find that all the energy was sapped in lamenting over things that had already happened, over which I had no control at all. This stage can make the strongest feel desperate for happy things, all inside them. You’d fail to acknowledge light even if it hung brightly in front of you, so lost you could be. And this stage is demanding, it demands all your goodwill, to even try to get away from such stage, and to do something of this fashion alone, is a difficult task to say the least.

And perhaps the biggest irony that we face, is the fact that all this happens out of our desire to be happy. Yes, happiness can be a culprit, drawing into some of the greatest downfalls that we may have ever gone through. As someone explained to me today, it is only because we have an unquenchable thirst for success, that we lose our happiness; though we forget one simple fact that our desires are never ending. Rare are the people who don’t desire anything out of life, who are content with the way things are, around them. Ask around, and so many may talk about how they are content with what they have. NO, truthfully, beneath the layers that we all keep, we aren’t. The desire for success is never ending. We’ll end up running towards things that may do us more harm than good, if it is deemed successful by the society; the same society that influences us, for we are but one part of this society.

Wanting happiness isn’t a bad thing to ask for, never has been and never will be, and it will be idiotic to even ask someone to part ways with their happiness, this just won’t work. However we work upon the pre conceived notions about happiness and success, and success in today’s normal world means good grades, good placement, and then it goes on to, a place to stay, a car to drive, a person to share memories and so on. What people want for success is a never ending tale, for everyone runs to get all these things, and when, we are stopped in the path, delayed, even if this happens for our betterment, we will lament the time we didn’t get a certain thing. A kid playing with his PS4 will lose happiness over not having an iPhone, a student who has good grades, will lose head over placements, even if the process has just begun, and better things might be there for them, yet since we can’t look into the future, we’ll lose happiness over all such reasons.

But if we really look around, don’t we deserve to be happy? Truly, our ideas of what success is are going to be changed every few days, but that shouldn’t stop us from being happy. All it really takes, is to separate happiness and success, for these two mixed together, are the perfect recipe for disaster waiting to happen, in the back of our head. We have but one life and if we aren’t spending it on happy moments, are we really living the life? We’ll always aim high, and if this aim ends up killing our buzz, then we know, that we need to separate our happiness and success. It is better to make ways easier for us, than to make it so that we lose our path or even the motivation. The choice is simple yet quite enticing one, either separate notion of happiness from how you define success or subtract both of them altogether, in the end, the choice solely ends with us.

Comments

comments