Being Happy

In the book "Happiness", by Richard Layard, he states that the increasing wealth of western countries does not lead to a corresponding increase of happiness among its citizen and neither around the world. And hence it is important that nations should be governed on the basis of what will make people happy, instead of what will make them rich.

And it sounds convincingly true in the context in today's' world. Why people wants to be rich ? That seems
to be like a very simple question, with an obvious answer of " to fulfil the requirements". But will those fulfillments really make you Happy at the end of the day?

We make choices, and thats a very humane thing to do. But, more important is about taking decisions that would do good and make us happy. Now if we try to define the term " Happiness ", we can never come out with a conclusive definition or relate a physical description for that.

Things that would make you happy would not necessarily make others feel the same, in the same situation like yours.

Did we ponder on what makes this difference?

Frederick Keonig points out that " We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of something we don't have but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have".
Simple and crispy answer for the whole ambiguity on defining the Happiness or to ponder upon the difference.

This just tells us that, we needn't be a definition hunter for everything that we find intriguing, and Happiness as a matter of fact is the most intriguing of all. But, we do sometimes forget to acknowledge that. We fail to see, that we could be happy with what we have, and with the choices that we have to pave in ways for further more such avenues. But, as soon as we start defining the term 'Happiness', we try to limit our happiness. We forget to recognize the things we have at this moment. Instead of valuing it with what could be done next, we try to monetize the whole issue.

We fail to see the things we have, and instead start fantasizing on the things we don't. Fantasizing could be an debatable word here, but the important point is we start comparing our failures with the success of others.

We tend to forget success doesn't necessitate about monetizing every aspects of life. This makes other beautiful things of life look like an irrelevant entity. The moment we monetize our success or failures alike, it is simple like that of opening a pandora box. A box, full of surprises and further choices to be made.

In his book "Paradox of Choice", Barry Schwartz tells us that, we need to understand why more choices lead to less happiness and our continuous actions of figuring out what to do about it. Well, the reason is simple. Each new choices adds up more to the probability of choosing a bad choice. And this gives us more risks of missing out an even better choice.