Can you create happiness by chasing happiness
Is happiness a thing to have or a feeling to feel? Is it a social tool or a private joy?
Why is it so important to:
- Be seen as happy.
- Be happy.
- To pursue happiness if you’re not happy.
For many, happiness is momentary like New Year fireworks and that first conversation with a new found lover; dynamic, exciting and truly enjoyable.
Lately, when watching people ‘chase’ and ‘encourage’ or ‘push’ happiness, I can’t help but wonder, is all this focus on being happy, for or against the real thing?
Can a persistent pressure towards an experience that moves organically, actually remove the possibility for it?
And if so, worryingly, is it then somewhat more about being seen to look happy, rather than to actually experience it? What’s that about?
When the right to a pursuit of happiness becomes an arbitrary social expectation, does it enter the same race as other expectations we work to move away from? Like to have a certain job, x amount of money or special social status?
Has happiness, become the new impressive, desirable, social status?
Given that expectations aren’t like Opportunities or Possibilities, if happiness is an expectation, aren’t we moving toward what we passively avoid? Unhappiness?
The unspoken sentiment, or unwritten law, is a confusing baseline which says ‘it’s bad to be unhappy”. But why is it bad?
Emotions move through similar to the way in which water lives on land; slow, creeping, rough, powerful – all variables imaginable, but mainly, dynamic. Dynamic because of Possibility and Opportunity.
Is it dynamics, ‘changing water’ that scares us? Or is anything other than happiness, too vulnerable, too delicate to embrace? Why do we avoid or condemn what is inherently natural to embrace? Why (as a growing society), do we have to pretend that we don’t know, when we do…
I know, and you know, that it’s perfectly normal and natural to not be happy some times. I also know, as you do, that there are different kinds of happiness, which aren’t necessarily pursuable outwardly to satisfy others. And some kinds of happiness, the real kind, contradict what we are expected to enjoy…
When that happens, are we failing at happiness? No. We’re just not complying with another expectation, that doesn’t truly serve joy. And that’s quite alright.
Just knowing this, in my heart of hearts, truly makes me happy…
What makes you happy?
This article can also be found here.
