The Measure of Happiness: How YOU Feel

Lately I’ve come to realize the obvious:  in the pursuit of happiness there is only one measure of success — whether you feel happy.  When you’re trying to pursue happiness, several points:

Different people like different things — what makes others happy may not make you happy.

People are different, and different things make different people happy.  As basic as it may sound, you have to evaluate, for yourself, what makes you happy.  It may happen that other people genuinely enjoy things that don’t do much for you.  Conversely, you may get a lot of enjoyment out of things that other people don’t enjoy.

For example, I personally don’t really enjoy watching sports on TV, going out for gourmet food, or getting drunk.  And yet, many people enjoy these very much.  On the other hand, I enjoy some things that other people may not enjoy, such as reading mathematics, listening to happy pop music, or (as a 36-year-old guy) watching Sex and the City.  Which leads to another point –

Every culture has expectations about what people should and shouldn’t enjoy — and in some cases these expectations are different from what people actually enjoy.

In many cases, social expectations about what brings happiness will match with people’s actual experience of what makes them happy.  But social expectations can sometimes be just plain wrong about what makes people (or some people) happy.

The bottom line is that if you want to be happy, you’ll ultimately have to discover what makes you happy — not what makes other people or most people happy, and not what society more generally feels ought to make you happy.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from others — what other people say makes them happy may very well make you happy too.  But at the end of the day, we’re all unique and the pursuit of happiness is an individual pursuit.