As a teenager, I started asking myself questions like ‘what is the meaning of life?’, ‘what are we supposed to be doing here on Earth?’, ‘what is the end game?’. When thinking about these topics, I couldn’t find a satisfying answer and my thoughts would keep looping into the same cycles or ending up in a dead end. So – I figured, maybe I was too young to understand or that I didn’t have enough life-experience or hadn’t read the right books yet. My Latin teacher was an older man who loved philosophizing and was well-read in a large area of topics – and often had given me unexpected perspectives that I hadn’t considered. So, I figured, if anyone would know the answer to those questions, it might be him. When I asked him what he thought the purpose of our life here was, I was sitting there, expecting a complex and intelligent answer, thinking I might solve this puzzle and put it to rest now once and for all. And then he said ‘Maybe we’re just supposed to be happy’. Imagine my disappointment…
See, the older I got, the more I became aware of how little I was aware of – the amount and kinds of problems in the world started becoming more and more apparent to me. So, ‘happiness’ just seemed like the most immature answer a person could have given me.
Of course, I had blown off the answer and hadn’t looked any further. For instance – I didn’t think the word ‘happiness’ even ‘deserved’ my time of asking myself what happiness is or could be. With the word ‘happiness’ I just pictured this blissful state of ‘feeling good’ – but pairing that up with the problems everywhere around us, I could only see it as an ignorant, superficial and selfish state of mind.
Now, so many years later – if I allow myself to ‘step out’ of that one singular definition of happiness and ask about: what would happiness look like, what would it mean – then I come to a different conclusion. For instance – would happiness really be happiness if it is a momentary feeling/experience that only you ‘benefit from’ – and then even only just for a moment? If we instead, look at happiness as something all beings would express all of the time, would that change anything? In that case, happiness is no longer an act of selfishness, but would really only become possible when we’ve sorted out the huge problems that exist in the world today and taken measures to prevent them from re-occurring. In a world like that, yeah – I can see happiness becoming a real possibility, because you’d no longer have to ignore everyone else’s hardships and cling to your own little world to ‘experience’ happiness – we would actually be able to be quite happy – do things together, have fun, support each other, genuinely.
If that kind of happiness is the purpose of our being here – then the road to get there looks entirely different, then happiness is not something we can claim for just ourselves, our friends, our family – it entails a path of responsibility to actually take on the problems that exist today. And I’m not saying “Go forth and solve world poverty” off the bat. The nature of our existence is such that everything is interconnected – as above, so below – the outer reflecting the inner – the world existing in the smallest of particles and scenarios – so, each one can start with their own problems, on a personal level – and as you move and walk and have sorted through most of your own problems, increase your level of responsibility to assist and support others to solve their problems, and then when you see you can increase your level of responsibility again, go out there and see how you can reach and support even more people through perhaps taking on a particular structural problem in society.
If you don’t know how to do that – how to actually take on your own problems to start with – sign up for the free DIP Lite course – it’s a great little course that shows you all the basic tools you need to get started on the path of Real Happiness. And maybe you’re not there yet, you know, maybe at the moment you feel like – you can just hold out for a while longer in your own version of happiness. But when that bubble pops, or you hit something unexpected in your life, or if you realize that you’re not that happy after all – it’s not too late, bookmark this post and you can find your way to the support that is available.
Thank you for reading.