Happiness: Where Can It Be Found? - The Self Improvement Blog

By Gabriel Chibuike Okeke -

What is the meaning of life, if not to be happy and useful? The term happiness has been an object of discourse among some great psychologists, philosophers, scientists and theologians. Some have asked and answered the questions: ?What is the meaning of happiness? Do all people seek happiness? Do all people believe happiness is attainable somewhere? Where can happiness be found??

Man strives for happiness and led some to seek it in materialism, others in knowledge and so on. Ancient philosophers like Socrates and Plato viewed happiness as a content of virtuous life. They are normally taken to be the founders of ethical determinism. To know God is to do good. For Epicureans, happiness consists in the life of enjoyment, while some find theirs in religion or honor. The primordial question remains ?What constitutes true happiness??

No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore you have the power to change anything about yourself. As you go through all kinds of feelings and experiences in your journey through life, in all delights, surprises, chagrin, dismay, disappointment, difficulties etc., try and hold this question as a guiding light: ?What do I really need right now to be happy.? What you will come over and over again is that only qualities as deep as love, kindness and conviction will really make you happy in any sort of enduring way. When we allow frustration, failure, disappointment and sadness to snatch the main purpose of living, then we will be left with nothing more than great submission to the world of uncertainties and depression and as clinical or counseling psychologists stated depression left untreated can become fatal. One should never allow failure and difficulties to weigh him/her down because when those things are well managed, they become key to enviable height. Heroes emerge out of adversities. After all people like Abraham Lincoln succeed to be the 16th elected President of the United States after many series of great failures. It doesn?t matter how long we may have been stuck in our imaginations. If we go into a dark room and turn on the light, it doesn?t matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week or twenty thousand years, we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.

Happiness according to Plato borrowed by Aristotle and confirmed by Thomas Aquinas is the ultimate end of man. The goal of all striving, this is because happiness is not something you can feel on experience at a particular moment as one feels joy or gladness on when one is favored by fortune but it is rather a lasting State of being. True happiness is not found in wealth, honor or power as some people say: ?What is happiness without wealth? this is just an argument because if such were the case rich men would not also cry.

However, true happiness is to be found in the philosophical quest for good i.e. God. ?Our hearts are restless until they rest in God? says St. Augustine. Life without happiness is useless. While some seek it in wrong places; some also allow the activities of life to snatch it from them. Honor, intelligence, health, friends, virtues etc. can bring us passing feeling such as joy or gladness. But they are not happiness. Each of this is a means to attain happiness. A happy life is a good life. Happiness is not something that can be met in a day or a year, but in the whole cause of man?s life. True happiness is sought not caught. A happy mind is a great mind that?s why when one is happy, he is moved to perform all sorts of good works even beyond imagination.

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