The Pursuit of Happiness

The pursuit of happiness… What’s happiness? A feeling? A state? Why is it so hard to define? Is it because no one is really happy ? From what I know, we’re happy when we have what we are looking for, according to that, happiness can be defined as a feeling of satisfaction that appears once we achieve a goal, and as humans are by definition eternally dissatisfied, they’ll always be running after happiness. This reminds me of the story of the jar full of gold, that is supposed to be at the feet of each rainbow; children have been running for years to reach the feet of the rainbow, and no one ever succeeded. Moreover we usually want many different things, money, health, beauty, youth… the list is unlimited, just like our desires, and there are many dreams we’ll never realize, according to this last idea, is happy only the one who accepts that he cannot have everything, in that sense, happiness will have another definition and happy will mean being satisfied with what we have. Not to be extremist, I would say that being satisfied with what we have will take away our desire to move ahead, and to get more, or to do better; the reason why I think that the secret of happiness would be to create a balance between all our desires, not to focus on a single objective to avoid obsession and to accept that there are some things we’ll never have and to learn how to live without them. All of this may seem very positive, but this doesn’t mean that sorrow is forgotten in my way to see things, sorrow is very important to happiness, as no one can exist without the other. To sum up, I think that the secret of a happy life can be summarized in two rules, avoiding obsession and accepting defeat.

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