The Relativity Of A Happy Life

A recent conversation has prompted me to present a brief discussion on happiness and what it is we are actually doing with our lives. You could ask a person, any person really, what they want in life and if you pay close attention to their answers they will all boil down to some conception of happiness. What is happiness though? This is the tricky part, it is not easily definable as it varies from person to person. What makes one person happy, perhaps being with friends, might not make another person happy, who wants to spend more time reading alone. It’s relative, which is perfectly fine. The important point is to understand that we put ourselves through the daily grind because at the end we want some lasting happiness.

What concerns me is setting about to do so, without stopping to consider what relative happiness is to them. I hear people talk a lot about what they want to do, get a good job, get married, have a kid, but I rarely hear them discuss why these things are important to them. I love to ask the question, when did you decide this is what you wanted? More often then not we find that this decisions came to us long before we were aware of it, passed down from our family and culture. Very often I hear that the current course was determined as a teenager. I can safely say that my course was, and being a social workers was the fulfillment of that, but still, I did take the time to sit down and analyze what I am doing with my life.

Decisions made as a teenager are shaky at best. The teenage brain has not fully developed a understanding of which values are important because it satisfies oneself, and which are important because it  satisfies others. Understanding this is crucial to getting a sense of what will make a happy life when he or she is expected to decide their own course. I’ve watched too many friends, convinced they knew what they wanted when they were younger, jet through life on a course set by the motivations of others only to question what the hell they are doing with their lives. It’s not that the lessons passed from our family and friends are wrong, they might be perfectly right, but that we had better put those beliefs under some serious examination before half our life is gone in some wasted effort to appease the ones we love.

What makes a happy life? Honestly I really don’t know, I only know what makes a happy life for me. I could venture to guess the commonalities between everyone relative beliefs on happiness.  I would imagine that they generally include loved ones, and some type of satisfying work that they believe makes a difference in this world. That is a broad stroke and in know way encompasses the nuances of each individual life. Whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish in life, my advice is to keep it flexible and keep it under the spotlight occasionally. And perhaps, we all might just find a bit more happiness then we ever figured we would were entitled to.