Is Happiness Overrated?
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Is Happiness Overrated?
Happiness. How many times have not all of us heard that word? How many times have we not been asked if we really are happy? Happy at kindergarten, at school, at university, at work and at the retirement home. When asked what their main goal in life is, a lot of people answer that it is to be happy. But what is happiness? Is it possible to be too happy? And is happiness really all that it is cracked up to be? Some believe that happiness is the most important thing in the world and something that we should always be working towards where as others believe that we should focus more on living and less on trying to constantly achieve happiness.
A lot of people believe that if they only had a brand new Porsche or a mansion on the beach of some Caribbean island or a couple of million kroner in the bank, then they would be happy. For most people dreams like that will never become true and yet a large amount of those people will consider themselves happy. At the same time you find that many celebrities who have all the above mentioned things are not happy, the amount of celebrities who commit suicide is quite high, in fact many of the worlds most famous peoples lives ended in suicide. From this we can draw these conclusions;
1) Money and success does not make you happy. Or
2) Happiness is overrated, and is therefore not enough to make everybody want to live.
The lesson to be learned from the example of the rich and famous is that material things such as money and expensive things can only keep you happy for a while, this is a material happiness. Something that I think most people who have achieved material happiness agree on is that that sort of happiness is very overrated and not the sort of happiness that us human beings should be trying to accomplish. Material happiness is temporary and lacks substantial meaning. We should also consider that people by nature always want more than what they have, if you are rich, there is probably still someone richer. And although you may consider yourself to be happy for a while you will soon think that there is someone who is happier than you are- basically we are never satisfied with what we have, we always want more.
Happy and happiness come from hap meaning chance, fortune and luck. This could be seen by many as an indication that happiness is something we can not trust, something we can not control and therefore also something we should not attempt. It could mean that happiness is like a lottery, you can walk out a winner or a loser. Maybe the best way to live is to just accept that we can not be happy all the time, everyone has their ups and downs and if you have more downs than ups, well, bad luck for you I guess Most people however are not willing to accept this, because it is not fair.
We can also look at happiness from another point of view however; say there was a pill, a drug, with no side effects what so ever, which would send you to a world of complete happiness, a sort of Matrix 2.0, a virtual paradise in which you would be a programmed euphoric human being. If happiness really is the ultimate goal in life, it would be extremely foolish to say no, yet it is very probable that a large amount of the worlds population would say no to such a pill. The argument for rejecting such an artificial paradise is usually that happiness is about having goals and achieving them, this alone suggests that happiness is not the ultimate goal in life. It suggests that immediate happiness comes second to accomplishing goals, secondary to doing something yourself, secondary to truth.
Perhaps happiness is just a bi-product of the thing that we are trying to achieve in life but if that is the case, then what is it that we are trying to achieve and also, how are we going to define happiness? That is really what it all comes down to in the end, how you define happiness. Many people may define whatever it is that we do struggle to attain in life as happiness but does that really make it happiness? If happiness is the ultimate goal in life, it is by no means overrated but if it is not then it may very well be that it is glorified.
Another angle from which you can approach this question is to think