Throughout our lives we go through many fazes in which we find different things enjoyable, that which in turn make us happy at the moment. As a baby it may be a spinning mobile, as a teenager defying our parents or playing a team sport, as college student going to a party and drinking amongst friends, and as an adult providing for ourselves and starting a family. But, even in those moments were we truly satisfied? If we were to name one thing overall that truly fulfills our happiness, many of us wouldn’t be able to pinpoint what truly leads to it.
With all the pleasures of a first world society, it is easy to presume what happiness could be. We so often see the affluent in our society flaunting their wealth, traveling to the most beautiful places on earth, looking flawless, seeming to live without a care in the world. The people who live those lives are a minority, but somehow the majority believes that they have it all, that that’s what happiness must truly be. In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis’ writing he proposes that happiness is a concept that we obtain through self fulfillment. The fulfillment of focusing intensely on a task or goal and the feeling felt once that goal or task is obtained. Csikszentmihalyi says “Its not the result of good fortune or random chance. Its not something money can buy or power command.”
The problem with our society and Csikszentmihalyi explains it well, is that many of us are too busy looking and constantly checking up on ourselves to see if we are living up to what should be happiness, that we are actually missing out on the real thing right before us. The definition of happiness for each and everyone is us is going to be different. If we stop worrying about what material things society has established for us to be happy and in turn look for it within ourselves, we then will begin to find it. If we take all the experiences throughout our life, the ones we have control over and even the ones that we don’t, those are the experiences...
