Thoughts on Happiness

Thoughts on Happiness

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I think we’re all hopeful for happiness. The idea is fed to us since we were kids. Happiness is something to strive for. Happiness is the ideal baseline. I think this is a nice philosophy to have, but like ever philosophy, it’s aspirational, rather than reality.

Life isn’t always happy. I don’t think it has the capacity to be. Look around and you’ll see suffering and pain everywhere. Happiness is part of this life, but it isn’t the whole thing. We all have our bad times, days when happiness feels like an impossibility.

And this is normal. Of course it is. We can’t be happy all the time. But I think we suffer more for the idea that we should be. We should be happy, and so when we’re not, our distress compounds because we’re feeling shite and also giving ourselves grief for feeling shite.

I think it’s healthier, personally, to be open to the natural emergence of unhappiness. See the beauty in it. If you know what it feels like to be unhappy then it stands to reason that you know true happiness, too. For you can feel its absence, which means you have stood in its presence. And that’s gorgeous.

Everything we experience is important. It doesn’t always feel good, and nor should it. There can be happiness in this life, but there’s also much more to it.