How To Find Your Personal Happiness

How To Find Your Personal Happiness

We find and define our own happiness personally.

Main topics

How to be happy.
How to discover your own happiness or what makes you happy.
The process of becoming happy
My “suggestion” on becoming happy.

HOW TO BE HAPPY

No one can tell you or teach you how to be happy. It is too complex, to be subject to give precise directions. It comes and goes. It directly depends on how your everyday life evolves.

Probably you were happy and very much okay in college, but then adulthood and the responsibilities that come with it including a mortgage left you wondering: Where’d it all go? This is one of the key things that made Albert Camus conclude that just looking for happiness (and trying to define what it is) keeps you from being happy. Left for him

happiness kind of happens, without self-consciousness, without investigating possible states of being. Maybe you will get lucky.

But here is the thing, This idea of which someone refers to as “a cosmic toss-up” could itself make you very unhappy. So I ask, are we stuck in a logical bind? Not exactly.

How to discover your own happiness or what makes you happy.

It is possible to prescribe many a thing that can make you happy but i can’t prescribe what will make you happy but I think i can help you discover what makes you happy. You can make choices that fit your own needs. You can ramp up your self-awareness as you start defining what happiness can be— more precisely, your own.

You can, and should embrace the notion that happiness is often the reward for delayed gratification: We are not happy this minute, and before you know it, boom ! there it is. And this is probably because it is okay to let up on trying so hard. Thus, every happiness “prescription” starts with helping each person to find their own way.

This emphasizes on how each person gets to be happy—that is, on the process, rather than on the ultimate, individualized state—is what sets apart my approach from that other people tell you, point blank, what it takes to be happy. While you can learn from a set of curated directions, I am not convinced that specific formula, however well-intended, can take you through the many dimensions that you traverse as you grow, change, and wrestle with the unpredictable challenges life throws at you. Simply stated, one size does not fit all. If you look closely, in fact, most theorists don’t even agree on what happiness is.

In fact, Daniel Kahneman, a theorist suggests that happiness is a sort of prevailing sense of satisfaction— an affect, what you experience here and now. Others say it has more to do with appreciating the quality of your life as a whole. But such ideas are slippery. You could, for example, construct a map where the two coincide: take for instance, imagine the feeling you get because life turned out so well. Can you see where this is leading?

Straight into what I refer to as a semantic tangle (even Kahneman suggests that overall satisfaction is more important than what you feel right now).

But my point is more fundamental: You can define happiness a thousand different ways and still settle with someone else’s idea, which, for worse or foe the better, you are being asked to map into or onto your own situation.

Practically, I approach the question with no reference to formulas. I focus on the individual—not with the prescription anywhere near my mind—and then work towards how each person, in context with their own specific concerns, can make a go of working towards contentment, peace of mind, a measure of joy (whatever makes them happy in context with their circumstances).

I do not think of happiness as the situational type of happiness that we try to achieve at different times in our lives through different types of relationships. Most times, we are more concerned about happiness at work; at other times, sex and love matter most, or wellness

or getting old or family. We can really be happy at work, but our love life can be awful. We may be having great sex but fighting with family or friends.

People discover how to find happiness in areas of their lives where it is lacking. Of course, if you’re unhappy in one aspect of your life, fir instance, your health—you can easily be unhappy in others. But even in these complex situations, you work through specific challenges based on the particular situation; you

should not pursue some generalized, amorphous happiness that someone down the block may be chasing as well.

MY SUGGESTION ON BECOMING HAPPY

So, my “suggestion” is about finding a personal pathway, and most times multiple pathways, towards making the most out of where you are when one or another of these situations is challenging. Picture yourself as a Venn diagram. Located at the center is a type of syncretic happiness which is defined by intersecting circles that represent various sources of happiness such as the ones I mentioned earlier. How you draw these circles toward some sort of beneficial coherence is crucial to whether you actually can.

But probably you are thinking: Can’t your idea of “happiness” accommodate at least something I call (semantically challenged) guideposts, so we have something to hold onto? Yes. When people are “happy,” they can expect to be content. That is, they possibly can feel that they are in a sync with what life has to offer at their stage of life, and in relation to their overall circumstances. Such kind of happiness is a type of equipoise (i.e., a balance of factors) and it is unique to each and every individual.

So, as I have already suggested, I would encourage you to consider primarily about getting to happiness, i.e., becoming happy. As with so many goals (for example, a good education), often times it is the

journey that counts. As a matter of fact, how do you actually become happy if I may ask ? What are the steps and processes ? Happiness is not just some state that one exists independent of each person’s deliberate attempt to achieve it. The goal is less about happiness than about how to achieve it. It’s about finding your way. Each of us has to definitely deal with personal issues and overcome problems. But we can still work towards a certain contentment.