Whole And Happy
Wisdom Letter #39 | The one about Finding Flow
Are you a happy person?
Or
Do you pursue happiness?
In your day to day lives, do you think about how happy you are?
Do you always do the things that make you happy? Is it even possible to think like that?
And if not, then how do you decide what to do, how do you decide something is worth investing your time in?
Do you strive for pleasure, power, money or fame? and does the achievement of those goals translates to happiness? Or do you look for a sense of purpose and meaning in your day to day activities, and derive happiness from there?
Is the pursuit of happiness different from the pursuit of all other ambitions?
Is there a specific path to follow to achieve happiness?
Is it even a goal to be achieved?
Some people say happiness is just a state of mind, some say its a muscle that can get stronger with practice.
Happiness is also formulated as the mathematical difference between our reality and our expectations. You might have seen this elsewhere —
Happiness = Reality — Expectations
As someone said —
“Expectations are just resentments in training”
Keep your expectations low enough and you can be happy in any situation.
But is that a way to live?
After all, the human life is a rare gift, and the thrill that our ambitions and expectations provide is an experience worth having. They add immense value to the overall quality of the human experience.
That means, happiness is the ability to strike the right balance between upgrading our reality and downgrading our expectations, without compromising entirely on either.
Yeah right!
That’s a scary definition. And a misguided one as well.
Real life is not as straightforward as a mathematical formula. Internally, its a complex soup of biochemical reactions and externally its this soup interacting with random events that can have enormous or no impact on us in equal probability.
The pursuit of happiness is just one thread in this complex web.
Today on The Wisdom Project, we take a look at what our consumer culture is selling to us in the name of happiness, we re-examine the belief that to “achieve” happiness later in life we must struggle and embrace unhappiness right now.
We also go deep down the theory of “Flow” and stumble upon a framework on how to think about happiness.
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