“Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” – Aristotle
You know, I was always under the impression that one is truly happy when one is helping others. I lean less to that view today. Don’t get me wrong, making other people happy does give my life meaning and pleasure. I have wondered however whether I should be more deliberate about choosing to be happy myself first and foremost.
It’s just that … if it is always all about the other, what’s left for me or of me?
Is there not a space where one can be selfish and do things that gives one joy without always having to put other’s happiness first?
I really think that a strong argument can be made that to be really happy, you sometimes need to think of self-interest before thinking of others. Why? Because you’re more likely to help others when you feel good. When you’re happy, it’s easier to make other people happy.
When you’re miserable it’s harder to think about the well-being of others. Unless, of course, you believe you’re on this planet to suffer and your reward will be in the afterlife. That’s a strategy, I suppose.
I think that you only have one important choice in life: Either you decide to be happy or you decide to be unhappy.
I suggest that the better choice is to be happy. Find things that bring you joy and then find ways of doing those things. I can’t really phrase it better than Harold Whitman, “ Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And the go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Being happy is really under our control. However, we give away that control to two small qualifying (and interchangeable) words, “when” and “if”.
We say things like, I’ll only be happy when/if I have a new car, house, boyfriend, shoes, lose weight, get into that school, I’m divorced and so on. These are just events (outside of you). “Events don’t determine whether or not you’re going to be happy. They’re just events. You determine whether or not you’re going to be happy,” The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
If you believe that people and even
ts make you happy, you’re heading for a world of hurt. Your spouse can walk out on you or die, your kids can turn out to be real twits even after you spent the best 20 years of your life rearing them to the best of your ability, you can lose your job or a million things you haven’t even thought of yet could befall you.
You have no control over these events. But, you do have control over how you react to them. You can choose happiness or unhappiness. It doesn’t matter what you choose, you just can’t cop out and blame any event or person for how you feel. You only get to play for a short time … you may as well make it a happy time.