An Algorithm for Happiness

Making life better a day at a time

I saw this video about a year ago. Ever since, I have watched this video a few times. Every time I watch it, it resonates a little more. Mo Gawdat, Chief Business Officer at Google, lost his son in 2014. I lost my mother a few years ago.

Losing someone really close to you makes you think about life. Or at least, that is what happened with me. Life begins to feel like an illusion and you want to find meaning in everything you do. You want to find the meaning of life itself. You begin to respect life.

Gawdat is bang on in this video. Modern life has led people to the weekend unplug and recharge culture. The work hard and party harder adage forms the lifeblood of most young professionals. Does it bring true happiness? Not quite. However, it does most definitely create an illusion of happiness.

Happiness, like Gawdat says, is a state of peaceful bliss. We replace that with fun and create the illusion that we are happy. I absolutely do not mean to say that having fun or indulging in fun activities is bad. In fact, fun activities can enhance one’s creativity and are good for general well-being.

Too much fun, however, is counterproductive. Moreover, the idea is to get inner peace and true happiness that is devoid of any external locus.

True happiness is just a state of being.

It is not derived from doing anything. It just is.

It comes when you have learned to be at peace with how things are at present. You definitely work to make things better, every day, a day at a time. But you make peace with the loss and accept life as is. Anxiety will be nipped in the bud or even before it begins to bud. This may seem like a load of BS but once you get into this happy state, things begin to work out in a much smoother way. Life becomes easy to handle. Solutions seem to flow to you.

When you are happy within, you make others in your life happy too. Happiness is like a virus. A good virus. Spreading it around means having happy people in your universe. More happy people mean fewer people who create stress. This even breaks the vicious cycle of stress.

Be happy. Spread the happiness. Create an algorithm for happiness :)