The importance of the word "Happiness" in our lives can be summarized when we state happiness to be the overall purpose of life. If you asked anyone why he is living he/she answers with a variety of goals, but if you kept extending your questions about goals of the goals you will reach happiness through anyway he will follows. If you tried asking a man why he lives, we can imagine the following dialogue with him
- I live to work
- And why do you work
- To get money and achieve self actualization
- Good, and why do u need both
- Money gets me all what I want, and self actualization makes me elated
- And when you get what you want, how do you feel? Happy we can say?
- Yes
- Same applies for the elation feelings related to achievements, right?
- Yes
Try to apply this model to any other dialogue, if he/she replied with “I live for my kids” you can take it the same way, you will end-up that he/she wants to achieve happiness through his siblings happiness. Even for a highly religious character, you will find the only difference is the extension of happiness purpose to cover the eternal life after death. Subsequently, happiness and its nature was a great interest since the start of philosophy and until this moment. Wide variety of happiness definitions did exist throughout mankind history. Starting from a simple straight forward definitions as “an emotional or affective state that is characterized by feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction” to Aristotelian perception of happiness as the only thing that humans desire for its own sake. He observed that men sought riches, or honor, or health, not for their own sake but in order to be happy. Happiness was an extended subject for philosophers to wonder about how a man can achieve it, for psychologists to explain it and link it specific activities or actions, for artistes to record in their great classics, and even for scientists to explain the mediators and chemical transmitters of happiness feelings. Yet, this is all far away from my subject today, which is all about the perception of happiness as extended status versus its perception as a momentary mode.
I see we usually have a misleading perception of happiness as an island where we rest after sailing in life’s oceans; we perceive it as an extended status or stage of life that we actually never reach, babies observing their elder brothers going to school will imagine reaching school age as the edge of happiness, which turns opposite when they reach it, students’ dream is graduation and independency, once achieved they realize that it was not the dreamed-of island. Same applies to love, marriage and children. For a position we are looking for as well as for annual income…etc. We keep waiting to attain happiness through reaching a specific stage in our lives, and this is the underlying cause of most of agonies and frustrations. Simply because this island of happy man does exist only in our minds and in the Nirvana of Buddhism, but not on this land.
I often visualize happiness as waves, situational status that might last for minutes or days, you might be happy now and few moments later you get a phone call that distracts your happiness, and vice versa, the curve of our happiness can never be a steady one, it is composed of countless peaks and valleys. Shall this mean we have nothing to do about it? No, we have surly the major role of guiding the frequency and duration of our happiness waves, everyone can elaborate about his own keys to moderate his waves, the keys I had uncovered myself in myself are:
1- Love Doers Role
2- Today-Tomorrow Scale
3- Soul Windows
4- Catch it Role
5- Balling Role
6- Goal Orientation
7- SS Role
8- Clean House Role
9- Inner Circle Role
On my next article, I will elaborate about the 9 roles one by one.
- I live to work
- And why do you work
- To get money and achieve self actualization
- Good, and why do u need both
- Money gets me all what I want, and self actualization makes me elated
- And when you get what you want, how do you feel? Happy we can say?
- Yes
- Same applies for the elation feelings related to achievements, right?
- Yes
Try to apply this model to any other dialogue, if he/she replied with “I live for my kids” you can take it the same way, you will end-up that he/she wants to achieve happiness through his siblings happiness. Even for a highly religious character, you will find the only difference is the extension of happiness purpose to cover the eternal life after death. Subsequently, happiness and its nature was a great interest since the start of philosophy and until this moment. Wide variety of happiness definitions did exist throughout mankind history. Starting from a simple straight forward definitions as “an emotional or affective state that is characterized by feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction” to Aristotelian perception of happiness as the only thing that humans desire for its own sake. He observed that men sought riches, or honor, or health, not for their own sake but in order to be happy. Happiness was an extended subject for philosophers to wonder about how a man can achieve it, for psychologists to explain it and link it specific activities or actions, for artistes to record in their great classics, and even for scientists to explain the mediators and chemical transmitters of happiness feelings. Yet, this is all far away from my subject today, which is all about the perception of happiness as extended status versus its perception as a momentary mode.
I see we usually have a misleading perception of happiness as an island where we rest after sailing in life’s oceans; we perceive it as an extended status or stage of life that we actually never reach, babies observing their elder brothers going to school will imagine reaching school age as the edge of happiness, which turns opposite when they reach it, students’ dream is graduation and independency, once achieved they realize that it was not the dreamed-of island. Same applies to love, marriage and children. For a position we are looking for as well as for annual income…etc. We keep waiting to attain happiness through reaching a specific stage in our lives, and this is the underlying cause of most of agonies and frustrations. Simply because this island of happy man does exist only in our minds and in the Nirvana of Buddhism, but not on this land.
I often visualize happiness as waves, situational status that might last for minutes or days, you might be happy now and few moments later you get a phone call that distracts your happiness, and vice versa, the curve of our happiness can never be a steady one, it is composed of countless peaks and valleys. Shall this mean we have nothing to do about it? No, we have surly the major role of guiding the frequency and duration of our happiness waves, everyone can elaborate about his own keys to moderate his waves, the keys I had uncovered myself in myself are:
1- Love Doers Role
2- Today-Tomorrow Scale
3- Soul Windows
4- Catch it Role
5- Balling Role
6- Goal Orientation
7- SS Role
8- Clean House Role
9- Inner Circle Role
On my next article, I will elaborate about the 9 roles one by one.
3 comments:
interresting
waiting for what will follow
rgrds
oups, another thing but related to another post.
i did not know that men can be pleased by just a word
i thought it to be part of female world/ thinking.
Goood to konw :)
rgds
Dear Nourita,
Thank you, I am pleased you liked the post. About the pleasure that can be encoded into a word, yes dear, both men and women need it and enjoy it. Men are not generally as materialistic as they are apparently thought to be. At least some of them
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