Is Happiness Worth Pursuing Or Have You Already Experienced it?

Is happiness something to be pursued, or is that something we feel?

People chase after happiness as if it’s a state of mind. Like something you reach at some point in your life once you’ve done it all in your bucket or to-do list. Checking off a list containing all the things you want and achieve.

Some people see it as a to-do list before they can achieve happiness. Once I buy a house, once I get married, once I have a car, once I reach the top of the corporate ladder. The list could go on.

But today, in such a busy world, with everyone being occupied with multiple commitments, we forget that our moods vary too with the things that happen in our busy lives. Happiness, as we first learnt as kids, was a feeling. Pure bliss and joy. It was once as small as having a new toy or having a new friend at the playground to play with. As we grow up, we equate that new toy with a new house or a car. That new position at work, marriage, as being popular in school (or something non-tangible).

But we forget that we felt first happiness when our parents came home after work with our favourite snack. Or watching our favourite TV show every week without fail, or simply eating the foods we liked. Hanging out, playing games with other kids in the block after school. Not having any homework (rare, but still, YES). Even just feeling happy for no reason at all. When nothing went wrong. It got lost as we grew older with more concerns and things to worry about. As kids, we didn’t care what people thought about us, as long as we were having fun. The concept of happiness became more and more blurry and further away from us as we aged. It became a concept that we had to understand and even get (literally).

Nowadays, many that I’ve met see happiness as something to achieve. An achievement or a ‘badge’ in life that we need to complete. A ‘task’ list of to-dos to earn. As if it’s a sticker of achievement you had in your homework. You felt happy when you got that new sticker on your assignment. But we forget that we can be happy without that sticker too.

We sometimes forget that the little pleasant things in life make us happy too. The bus that came just as soon as we reached the bus stop, the colourful, pretty birds we see on top of trees, just having people around you who genuinely love and care about you. You feel happy in the presence of these, not because you had to ‘earn’ all of that to achieve ‘happiness’. Happiness shouldn’t have to be earned.

And personally, I think that happiness is a feeling. We feel joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and the list goes on to more complex ones. Have you seen Disney Pixar’s Inside Out? Yeah, that. Joy. Happiness.