"The Idea of Happiness " by Marcos S

 

“What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all? There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was:

“You’ll die and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease asking.” But dying was also dreadful.”

― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

 

Since the first moment a human being sat down and simply thought, impossible to answers about us, life, and existence have been asked. It’s a staple of mankind, of our humanity to ask those unanswerable questions. What’s the meaning of life? Where did we come from? How did we get here? Why do we dream? What does it mean to be alive? I don’t really ask myself those kinds of questions, because the way I see it is that those questions and their answers have no effect on my actual life in the moment, so why worry about it? But there is 1 question kinda like those that I do think about sometimes.

 

What does it mean to be happy? What is the meaning of happiness?

 

I’ve never thought about it too much until I began writing this, as I’ve always been happy so I’ve simply never cared enough to think about what that really meant. But today, I’ll try to find and tell you what happiness means to me.

 

I started attempting to answer this question by looking at myself. As I've said, I've always been happy with myself and my life. Not completely, I've lost loved ones before and I'm very self critical, but overall, I’ve always been happy. But why?

 

After thinking about it for a few weeks, I’ve finally figured it out. My definition of happiness, is to be content with one’s life. Let me explain.

 

I’ve always been contempt with my life. Of course there's more that I want, especially when it comes to my future after high school. But right now, in the moment, I am very content. I have close friends, a loving family, good education, good opportunities for my future, good entertainment, and a decent amount of money. Could they all be better? Yeah, of course, but I’m fine with it all as they are now. Of course I want it to be better and improve, to have more, but it could stay the same and I would still be just as happy.

 

And I believe that this can apply to others as well. If your content with your life, you have a good job, good income, good family, good friends, good house, good food, a loving spouse, and whatever else. If you are content with your life and don’t need anything else, then you are happy.

 

Of course, just because you are content with your life and happy, that doesn’t mean you can’t want or strive for more. Perhaps some people reading this may think that I believe you can’t want more of anything and be happy, but that could not be further from the truth. Even if you are satisfied with your life in the moment, people are always going to want more. Whether that's a new car, more money, a love interest, a dream job, a new phone, or anything. People are going to want to have and achieve more than they have, but you can want more and still be happy with where you are now.

 

That all being said, it’s important to remember that happiness is a vague concept that doesn't have 1 true meaning. Your meaning of happiness does not have to be 1 exact thing or have a specific meaning attached to it. Happiness can come from the smallest things in life. Do whatever makes you happy, and find your own meaning of happiness and try to achieve it if you're not already there. But if your struggling with finding a meaning, maybe try to remember what my meaning was. Maybe it could be yours too.