When it comes to looking at what your happiness truly resembles, there’s many different elements to think about and explore. Here are some of the key elements that go into working out what happiness could truly look like for you.
Define Happiness and Accept Its Myriad Forms
Really, happiness is never about what it should be, and instead, what it really is. Sure, we all know what happiness should look like according to a corporate, materialistic approach, but what does it say about you when you notice that instead you’re at your happiest doing some home improvements or working hard at your middle-paying job? One of the easiest and most tragic ways to fail in life is to chase goals that are ultimately completely irrelevant to you. If you look up one day and realise you’ve spent years getting after the completely wrong thing for you, not only is this a waste of time, but it’s also placing you further from the things that make you happy.
So, what’s the solution here? It’s a simple one, you must accept that you will never have a neat answer when asked to define your own idea of happiness. You will never exhaustedly know what your happiness is, and that’s exactly why you can’t build a perfect roadmap right to it. This might sound a little bleak, but don’t view it like that. Sure, you don’t know the way to happiness, but instead you know that happiness potentially lurks in every new task and new encounter, if you’re open to receiving it.
Without this openness, you could miss it entirely, but once you come to approach life in this more open, optimistic way, you will see happiness and opportunity lurking far more often.
Truly knowing your own happiness and coming to understand its many forms isn’t really an external thing, but much more about coming to know your own needs, sensibilities, and pleasures. You need to know how you thrive, and your self-destructive tendencies. You need to know where you tend to fall, as well as where you soar. Then you can really pick up on the parts of life, activities and areas that make the difference to you.
What is Happiness to You?
At the end of the day, you’re in a unique position to get to know your own attitudes here. By simply paying attention to what it is you enjoy and thrive at, you can really begin to pick up on what you should be chasing in the long-term. There is a big difference here between short-term pleasures and things that bring real satisfaction, however. You need to understand the difference between your inherent skill for puzzle-solving or people skills and your love of videogames. Some things are designed to eat your time, including videogames and social media, if these things are your main loves, fair enough, but beware they’re designed to be everyone’s main loves. Their whole point is to block you from being productive in a more real sense. That’s why you don’t listen when your brain says you love videogames, but you do pay attention when you realise you took real pleasure from building that kitchen cabinet.