Everyone defines happiness for themselves differently and it means achieving a unique collection of things that varies from one person to another. Regardless of what is in that collection or what goal is the primary constituent of your version of happiness, the one thing that is same for everyone is that we are all chasing after it. Some of us, who are very lucky, have already found happiness in their life while some are still in the process of finding it. Most of us, however, have actually found happiness but have still not realized it. We think of happiness as a destination rather than a way of life. We think that it will be a place in our lives where we would have everything we could ever want and until that time arrives, we need to keep toiling away. To help you understand what happiness is, you should first make the distinction between the things that you need in contrast to the things you want in life. Then you should further specify which of these are important to you, for your reasons rather than for impressing others or meeting a fanciful social standard that does not actually add any value to your life. Fulfilling your needs being you contentment in life which is a pre-requisite to happiness. It is not a place you reach but rather a phase in your journey itself. It is the feeling of waking up in the morning with having optimum amount of things to worry about that keep you busy but not overworked. It is knowing that your life is in a good state but still striving for something better. It is being aware of the things that you do have but still wishing for improvements regardless. It is knowing that your life is ultimately fickle in nature but still believing that you will be able to do your best to make it work in the end. To summarize, you can find happiness just around the corner or you cannot find it even on top of the Mount Everest. The pre-requisite is only to focus on your needs and being content after fulfilling them rather than chasing after a utopia which others have imposed on you because life is too short to please everyone and you will never be fulfilled by living out someone else’s life.
1. Repeat Active Recall Of What You Do have
Human beings are forgetful in nature. We do not remember anything forever let alone something that is not obvious to begin with. That is why we have to keep recalling the same thing over and over again to make it a part of our memory and the more we do it, the better that thing gets ingrained in our minds. After doing something for a long time, we often start doing it without even paying attention to it. A good example to that is with driving. If you drive to work or University daily then you will experience certain days where you make the same journey and reach your destination without actually remembering how you did it. The same concept applies to happiness as well. You need to keep actively recalling all the things that you do have going for you in life and this does not mean that you should magically be happy now because of them and stop every other endeavour you had going on. What I recommend is to just make this your first step and still keep striving for all the other things you need or want in life. For example, say someone wants to buy a big house and they are working two jobs for it. I suggest that they should first actively recall all the things that they currently have going for them before going about their day as usual. These could be things like good health, amicable relationships in family, an old but still your own place to stay etc. Working two jobs should not be affected by being grateful for what you do have just as wishing for a better house should not require you to degrade your current house to an inferior level than it is.
Truth is that we, as human beings, will always want something or another and we will always try to improve on things we do have. If you have a perfect house, you will want two perfect houses next and so on. If you get too much focused on only the things that you want and keep chasing after them then you will miss out on the things that you do have; things which make you happy without you even realizing it. Do not wait for them to disappear to realize their important and keep reminding yourself of them every day.
2. Balance Your Scale of Happiness and Work Today
If you do have everything that you need and you are only working to improve upon them i.e. to attain the things that you want in life, then I see no reason as to why you should keep putting yourself through hardships and hardships while hoping to reap some indeterminate rewards some time in the future. This is a perfect recipe for being unhappy in life. Your life should be lead in a delicate balance between your work, your responsibilities and rest. Unless there is a very clear goal in your mind to give priority to one thing over another for a finite duration like working two jobs to buy a house, studying for an exam etc, you should not tilt the balance. One good thing to note is that you do not need to put off the things that you enjoy because the time you need to rest and recuperate is not the same amount as the time you need to work. For example, you go to work 5 days a week but you typically only get 2 days off to recharge yourself so you can repeat this routine. Try to find happiness and enjoyment in your life wherever you can rather than delaying it for an unknown amount of time and exponentially increasing your expectations for the reward at the end.
Life is short and unpredictable; you should work with specific goal in mind and enjoy things whenever you can. The worst thing would be to alter the balance only to think about one while doing the other. If you are working for something then work like no one can do it better than you and if you taking time to enjoy yourself than enjoy it like no one else can.
3. Trust In The Process Rather Than Worry About the Future
The last thing you should do is to stop trying to control the future. You, like everyone else around you, have no power over the future. You can make choices that will have an effect on the future but it is never quite something that can be divided in white and black. If you keep worrying about things that are out of your control then you will always think that you are somehow not enough. But, if you focus on what you can control and make the choice that you deem to be the best to achieve the ideal outcome of your desire, then you can just commit yourself to that decision and lose yourself in it. Once you fully start trusting the process and think only to travel down your selected path then you will naturally forget about the paths that you never took and also of the possible rewards that you could or could not have attained had you opted for them instead. Focus on what you control and the choices you make should be the best possible choices you can make today to achieve your goals and not the choices that will prove to be the best tomorrow. If you are working hard for an exam, then only focus on that rather than worry about what will happen if things do not turn out the way you have expected them to. As long as you make the best decision today then future you should be able to deal with all the possible changes that he comes up against. Trust the process and trust yourself. Good luck!
