Is happiness overrated?

[Wild Flower]

I was at the book store today... and like all the display books were like "lose weight, be productive, gain a skill, find purpose and meaning, happiness, success"

And then I thought about it... is everyone miserable?? No matter wealth, looks, success, activities, love, purpose and all that.

Like you're born to be miserable, and that's that.

[Dena]

Happiness is being graceful for what you have and not envious of what you don't. I have reached that point in life and I am sure many others have as well. Our requirements do tend to change over time. When we are born, all we require is a dry diaper, a full tummy and somebody to love us. As we get older, we have more requirements but when you get down to it, we don't need many of the things in our life and we could be happy with very little.

[Cindy]

After a 18 month fight with cancer I have reconsidered everything in my life.

Happiness is being able to love others and wake up breathing. The rest is just trimmings.

[Laurie]

After a 18 month fight with cancer I have reconsidered everything in my life.

Happiness is being able to love others and wake up breathing. The rest is just trimmings.

Perhaps I need to revisit my own experience with cancer. I'm having trouble with that second part.

Laurie

[Serana95]

After a 18 month fight with cancer I have reconsidered everything in my life.

Happiness is being able to love others and wake up breathing. The rest is just trimmings.

Amen sister.

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[Gertrude]

Happiness is being graceful for what you have and not envious of what you don't. I have reached that point in life and I am sure many others have as well. Our requirements do tend to change over time. When we are born, all we require is a dry diaper, a full tummy and somebody to love us. As we get older, we have more requirements but when you get down to it, we don't need many of the things in our life and we could be happy with very little.

I agree and would add, not having unwanted obligations and having to put up with someone else's rules. The older I get, the more I want to free myself of these RE work and social/cultural rules. I'm starting not to care about certain expectations from other entities.


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[Bari Jo]

I totally disagree.  I actively strive to make myself happy.  I can totally see how self help books can get some people there too.  Usually what makes me happy is learning something, or doing something difficult, sometimes doing something I thought was impossible.  when I find myself down, rare, but happens, I try to turn things around by accomplishing something, a distraction, or a small part of what was getting me down.  Tonight, you know what made me happy?  I removed a glued mirror from the wall.  i had to figure it out, then did it.  No broken mirror either.  Yes, small and dumb, but I didn't know how to do it before, so bam, brain folded and I got one iota smarter.  I freaking love that.

Still though I totally get the getting older, not caring about somebody else's rules or approval.  I used to need that, and it led to an abusive relationship, circular logic, downward spiral.  Now, I pretty much do things for me, and yeah, it has made me a happier person.

[Lady Lisandra]

Happiness is not overrated. People just don't know what happiness really is. We usually believe we will be happy once we lose weight, change our cars, earn a lot of money, and we end up being unhappy to achieve things we believe will make us happy when we have them.

You are born happy in fact, but society teaches you to be otherwise. We are taught to believe happiness comes from being productive, looking good, being someone important, having an academic title. You probably won't find happiness in those things, because you need other stuff to be happy. Maybe living alone in the middle of the mountain makes you happy, and you don't need any of the things I mentioned above to be happy in that case.

[Kylo]

It's not a surprise so many people think they're unhappy. We've been conditioned throughout the whole of the 20th century in the West to be consumers and for the things we consume to promise to fulfill us and make us happy - except they're often just material objects, and our desires for them have been manipulated by clever advertising and psychological warfare.

No wonder so many people have mid life crises and a feeling of emptiness even if they own tons of stuff.

There's a general fake attitude of positivity all the time in the West as well - everyone is supposed to be happy and positive all the time... for some reason. And assumes if you're not happy all of the time there must be something drastically wrong with your life.

Personally I think happiness is a temporary state and the body is conditioned to focus more on states of want and need which predisposes us to feeling dissatisfied easily, and therefore unhappy easily. Even so I'm usually satisfied with a fairly simple life. I like being warm, fed and to live in the country, I like being able to converse and share ideas, I like being able to catch my own food, and apart from my work and creative pursuits I don't ask for much more than that. I'm not unhappy at all, in truth, being left alone to get on with things out here. The only thing that makes me profoundly unhappy any more is the state of Western civilization (and the look of the future) at present. I suppose the Bohemian lifestyle of a perpetual student like mine has conditioned me to being largely satisfied with the basics of some privacy and a place to sleep, making my current life almost idyllic (but probably not enviable to many).

Some of the happiest people I know are literally content and full of energy having a couple of kids, a partner, a simple house and a few dogs.

[warlockmaker]

As a buddhist life is a balance, good and evil, happiness and misery etc., with great happiness comes great misery. For example many are in a happy cloud when they first falll in love and when the relationship ends they are miserable, thus the balance is restored. We all have a different idea of happiness. For me, peace of mind, is my understanding of happiness.