Are you happy? Seems like a simple question doesn’t it? Let me ask you this. When you read that question, did you begin to qualify it? Or did you answer it outright? If you did not begin to qualify it, did you wonder what “qualify it” meant and begin to question whether you were actually happy or not?
You can ask people in today’s modern society if they are happy and you will likely get qualification questions in return. Things like…am I happy right now? Am I happy with work? Am I happy with my life? They are all qualification questions. Asking someone if they are happy is a question of being. How someone actually is. Not a qualification of their outside surroundings.
I have heard people say that they would be happy if they were rich. First of all, completely separate topic, if you ask them their definition of “rich” they will not likely have a concrete one like $2,567,894; it will simply be “a lot of money.” But that is for a different post. Back to being happy if they were rich.
I recently went on a tour in Newport, Rhode Island with family. I, my wife and sons bought a mansion tour for my in-laws for Christmas. We toured three mansions that were “summer cottages” for very wealthy families. They had tens of millions of dollars in the late 1800s and early 1900s. If you are interested, you can see that post here.
When we walked through one mansion in particular, the audio player actually spoke about the work that went into planning every day. Now, I need you to know that most families only spent 6 to 8 weeks a year at these “summer cottages” whose sizes were in the tens to low hundred thousand square feet. This was supposed to be a vacation time for them. The ability to get away from it all and relax. After all, by today’s standards, they would be worth in the high tens to low hundreds of millions of dollars. They can afford to relax, right? Wrong.
We learned that the women could change up to 12 times per day and the men were not far behind. Their time at the beach was planned at a certain time and so was their driving time, each meal, conversation, visiting…basically every minute of every day was planned. This was so that each family could keep up appearances of having it all while being gracious hosts and appearing to enjoy all life had to offer in an elegant fashion.
Does this sound like they were happy? Maybe that was their form of happiness. But, having generations of wealth and no freedom of time is not fun to me, nor would it make me enjoy life. In this example, people are tying “happy” to an economic status. Again, something that is external.
The people from the nation of Fiji are said to be some of the happiest people on Earth. Why is that? It seems that they derive happiness from their state of being. They are content with themselves, their lives, their surroundings, etc. First of all, I have to admit that living in a place that is used on calendars as a place of “wouldn’t you like to be here in paradise” probably helps their positive disposition. However, I recently read an interview with a number of Fijians. They were not concerned with acquisition of material items they did not have and was not required for survival. They were not in a constant state of “hurry” to do more work. They lived and enjoyed life.
This takes me back to the original question of this post. Are you happy? I would argue that being happy is an internally generated state of being. People can literally have next to nothing and be happy. While others can have lavish opulence and be unhappy.
As you work on taking control of your life, try to focus on happy as a state of being that is generated from a general contentment that you woke up this morning to celebrate another day. And if for some reason you do not wake up tomorrow, that you tried to positively affect those whom you love and care for. Do not tie whether you are happy to a physical object or socioeconomic status. Believe it or not, you actually have the power to dictate whether you are happy or not. The decision is 100% up to you. the accountability rests solely with you. Are you going to choose to be a happy or unhappy person? Take Control and live life by design…not by chance.