Pssst: You want to be happy?

I have blogged too many times about happiness, as clicking here will reveal.  I am practically obsessed with happiness--despite the General Malaise that I am!  As I wrote here, I suppose I often return to this theme only because I think people do not think through this as they go through the process of college degrees and careers and incomes and travel and everything else.

All because of a simple logic that life without happiness can be unbearable, and I want to lead a happy life however short or long that might be.

It is the pursuit of happiness that led me to ditching a career in engineering.  A career that might have delivered plenty of money but with a whole lot of unhappiness.  I understood--intuitively--that no amount of money can buy happiness, and this was the message that I conveyed to any interested student who was at least half-awake and listening to me in the real world classrooms before the current age of the coronavirus.

In this happy life, I am less concerned about stuff and more interested in making memories.  I remain convinced that memories is all that we take with us during that final journey.  Stuff doesn't make one happy.

More of power, prestige, and whatever else that we work for is no path towards happiness either.  Happiness is internal that is not based on something externally observable.

Nothing that I have written thus far will be new to any thinking person.  After all, the old wisdom in cultures across the world have clearly conveyed over the centuries everything that one would need to know about happiness.  Yet, all those and more need to be broadcast wider and louder now more than ever before because as rich as we are today, it is unhappiness that is on the rise!  According to the General Social Survey, "across the income scale, average happiness is decreasing in the U.S."

What a tragedy!

What might be the reason? "We don’t get happier as our society gets richer, because we chase the wrong things."

Chasing the wrong things.

[We] allow our hunger for the fruits of prosperity to blind us to the timeless sources of true human happiness: faith, family, friendship, and work in which we earn our success and serve others. Regardless of how the world might change, those have always been, and will always be, the things that deliver the satisfaction we crave.

So ... get to work, on your happiness.