What is Happiness and How Do We Get It?

Money

People often quote the saying "money doesn't buy you happiness" and to some extent that's true, but to some extent it's also not true. Although money in and of itself cannot buy you happiness, it can remove some of the barriers that can stop you from becoming happy. People can often find it hard to be happy when they're having to worry about whether or not they can pay the bills, put a roof over their head or afford to put food on the table. Being able to do these things won't make you happy on their own but they can prevent you from being happy if you can't do them. So simply, money might not be able to buy you happiness, but it can remove the barriers that can prevent us from being happy and better enable us to do those things that do make us happy.

People

          Humans are by their very nature social animals, thus we feel better when we have people around us. Therefore, the people around us form a key element to what makes us happy. Saying that, we cannot be truly happy if we feel we have to change who we are as a person in order to fit in and be accepted. This can lead to deep unhappiness by having to put on an act and constantly worrying about whether or not the people around you will eventually find out. Simply, although this may make us feel accepted and happy in the short term, by having to put on an act this forms a potential barrier to our long term happiness and thus proves fundamentally self-defeating. Thus, in order to be happy we must surround ourselves by people who are willing to accept us for who we are removing the need to put on an act and try and be something we're not.

          Although, as I said, humans are social animals, we all need some alone time every so often in order to wind down and relax and this too is simply natural. This being said, too much alone time can lead to feelings of isolation and low self-esteem which can eventually lead to depression and deep long term unhappiness.

Work

          People often complain about having to go to work and about the fact that sometimes they don't have the motivation to get up in the morning. The first I would ask would be if that you truly mean what you say then are you sure you're in the right job? But that's beside the point. I personally believe that work can offer you a real opportunity to improve your happiness. The obvious thing to say is that work provides you with the money to remove some of the barriers to happiness as discussed earlier, but there's more to it than that. Having a job provides you with prime opportunities to interact with other people and as I said, we as humans are social animals. Thus, this social interaction will improve our happiness, even if we don't always notice that improvement on a conscious level. However, this is only half the story. By carrying out a piece of work and then being complimented on that work, we improve our self-esteem and improve our feelings of self-worth and self-confidence. This will have a long term impact on our level of happiness and provides us with the confidence to do things we might not otherwise do further boosting our level of happiness.

Conclusion

          Simply, the human psyche is an ever complex thing but ever subtle in the way it works, an impressive feat of engineering I might add. In terms of happiness, can money buy it? No, but it does remove some of the barriers to our eventual happiness and better enables us to do the things that do make us happy. So money does help, but it's only half the story, we also have to put in the effort and do the things that do make us happy. This includes surrounding ourselves with positive people who accept us for who we are removing the need for us to put on an act. This also includes doing activities that we enjoy and in which boost our self-confidence, be it football, reading, traveling or anything else that makes you happy.

Well, until next time, thanks for reading,

Jason