I've always been curious with the struggle between happiness and unhappiness. It strikes me that after millions of years and billions of lives, each one of us still have to go through a big roller coaster of emotions with no official instructions manual. And so, in my spirit, the question arises:

Why are we so inefficiently happy as a whole?

If we look to history, we can grasp a sense of iterative evolution in humankind happiness. This happiness evolution seems very similar to evolutionary biology, although it’s main purpose is not the survival of fittest, but the wellness of next generations. Everywhere, people try to raise their children to a better life. And by my own experience, raising a child to become a happy adult is really hard and tricky. We also lack an official instructions manual on this theme, and some checklists (that would be great!).

Why are there no instructions manual for living?

In reality, there are. We have the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, the Pali Canon, the Mahabharata, we have an enormous amount of stories from oral tradition, we have romances, we have movies, we have games, and recently a ton of self help books. “How one should live?” has been the main subject of most of the writings since the beginning of humankind. For sure this has had a big impact on the happiness evolution. But even after millions of years, we still have a long way to go. Evolution is excruciatingly slow. Specially, since finding insights about happiness and sharing them, doesn't make others happy.

It seems we need to experience with our own skin, in order to believe. The tale of other experiences can only open possibilities for us. And for that to happen we need to be really aware.