What is happiness exactly? Is happiness a choice or is happiness a state of mind? If happiness is important, we need to understand what it means for us.

Your happiness is the most important thing about your life, and you should keep it like that. No, let me rephrase that. Happiness is the most important things about your life, and you must keep it like that.

How do you choose happiness over everything?

Now, what is everything?

There are so many things in your life which are competing for your attention at any moment in time. Every decision you take, there are so many factors you need to consider to decide which course of action you would choose among the ones that are available.

What are those factors?

There could be multiple things that people put before their happiness. The few below come to mind:

• Social acceptance
• Success
• Love and relationships
• Parents’ opinions

Let us look at all of these one at a time and understand why you should place your happiness over them.

Is happiness a choice over social acceptance?

Surprise! You don’t have to live a socially accepted life. You don’t, period.

One of the key reasons people don’t pursue their dreams, and happiness is because of the fear of social rejection. They feel that if they go against the society, the society would reject them. They fear that they would lose their friends, and they would not be able to enjoy the social circle they now do.

Let us say you are in that position right now where you have a social circle where nobody has had the guts to follow their dreams. Are those people happy?

I know the answer. The answer is no.

People who don’t follow their dreams hang out with people who don’t follow their dreams.

We need comfort and we need acceptance, right. So, people who follow their dreams find it hard to spend to spend time with people who don’t. Simply because people who have never had the guts to follow their dreams do not understand the ones who do.

Fuck society and social acceptance.

Choose your happiness. Just don’t give a damn about what people think of you. Why should you care about them?

Do they care if you are happy?

When they don’t why should you give a damn about them? There is absolutely no reason to care about people who don’t care for how you feel inside of you.

The most important thing about your life is if you are happy.

If you are not happy, why are you worried about social acceptance? You are not stupid. You have just been misguided.

Stop caring about what people think of you. I don’t know how else to express this. The only people you really need to care about the ones who care for how you feel inside.

You need to stop caring about people who value based on the things you have. That’s a shallow way to look at the world. A materialistic life is a curse. It is hollow and lacks depth.

Why would you want to live such a life?

You don’t.

Stop caring about social acceptance and start caring about your happiness.

Is happiness a choice over success?

Success is doomed. The society is full of rich and miserable people. The problem with success is that it has as many definitions as there are people. You need to choose what’s right for you, and nobody but you can decide what’s right for you.

The society doesn’t respect or care about anyone’s happiness because it doesn’t understand anyone’s happiness or can see it.

Happiness isn’t visible to others. How you feel inside cannot be seen by anyone.

However, people want an opinion on your life. Why? They want to do it for many reasons, some of them could be the below:

• To reflect on their life
• They want to judge you
• Perhaps they care about you while they don’t understand you
• They want to catch up with you
• Whatever the fuck be their reason

The point is they can’t do all of these if success is not the criteria for evaluation in life. They can only do so if they measure you with the things you have been able to buy with your success.

Now, as far as you are concerned, you need to make a choice whether you would want the success to impress other people who are looking for vectors in their lives, or you would do something for how you feel inside.

You need to choose happiness over success because the most important thing about your life is if you feel happy inside or not. If you don’t feel inside, everything that you have done to achieve all the success is the world in the material sense, is a waste.

Stop caring about success. If you are happy, you would be successful. Success is happiness and not the other way round. Success doesn’t always translate to happiness but if you are happy, you are a rare kind of species of human beings on the planet.

Most people are successful outside, and miserable inside.

Remember, happiness over everything, including success.

Is happiness a choice over love?

This is a complicated situation and I didn’t expect to write about this on this piece. However, this is a real possibility in life.

Love comes in different forms. There is love towards people, and there is love towards things you love to do.

Sometimes, it may happen that your love towards people may come in the way of your happiness. They may want you to quit the things that make you happy, and change yourself significantly, for the relationship to work.

What do you do in such a situation?

It is one of the most painful situations in life to have to choose between someone you love, and your happiness in other areas of your life.

Choose happiness over love, if you must.

Your first priority in life is to be you. If the person you love seeks to change you significantly for the relationship to last, the relationship becomes toxic. If you have to change yourself for the relationship, you grudge it, and are not able to give yourself happily to the relationship, as much as you want to.

Love shouldn’t come in the way of your happiness but be compatible with your happiness. Your happiness should also be the happiness of your partner. If it isn’t, and they have different values, the relationship wouldn’t be a happy one, even if there was love to begin with.

Was there love to begin with, if there is no compatibility?

We don’t know.

Compatibility is a complex dynamic and it takes time to understand. It is only when people live together, and face life together, try to work out a schedule together and see if they fit into each other’s lives. Compatibility is either there, or it isn’t.

By the time most people are in their late 20’s or early 30’s, they have formed a core personality and that core personality is not quite flexible. We may be able to change a few things here and there, but we can’t change our core. Hence, we can’t change ourselves for our love for people.

If you have to choose between love and happiness, choose happiness.

Unfortunately, you will end up losing a major slice of your happiness because that relationship in itself meant a lot to you, but a toxic relationship doesn’t deserve to exist. You are better off single than being in a toxic relationship. So is your partner. In a bad relationship, everyone suffers.

Is happiness a choice over parents’ opinions?

Another important reason why people are not able to pursue their happiness is parents. Our parents have grown in a world where being happy wasn’t a priority. They didn’t really care or know that they could be happy.

They held the same job for their entire lifetimes in many cases, and that job was like a chore that they had to do every day without any joy. So, they don’t really have a worldview about a life where one could be happy every day, doing what they really care about.

So, listen to your parents but don’t do what they say, unless your parents have achieved happiness on their own terms doing what they loved, which is a characteristic of a rare breed of parents, one could count on fingers.

Another important point we must make here is that selfishness that allows you to pursue your happiness over that of your parents’ wishes is not a bad thing. Selfishness by itself is not a bad thing. You are not trying to be mean and cause pain to anyone deliberately, and if you do what your parents want you to do, you would be unhappy in the long run, and blame your parents forever.

On the other hand, if you pursue your happiness, and they call you selfish, once you are happy and successful doing what you care about, they would be fine with it. Not all the time though. Most parents would be fine with it. If they aren’t, you need to question their love. All love should really care about is if the loved one is happy.

So, choose happiness over your parents’ opinions, even if that makes them upset in the beginning, they would be happy eventually.

Is happiness a choice in life? Absolutely yes. Happiness is a choice over success, social acceptance and even family’s opinions. In every moment of decision, we are asked to choose between happiness or something else. What would you choose?

So, what have we said here? Your happiness is the most important thing about your life, and you should choose happiness over everything. Some of the reasons people don’t choose their happiness or make it a priority are fear of social rejection, lack of success doing what they love, relationships or parents’ opinions. I am sure there are other reasons, but at the moment, these are the ones which come to mind. If you haven’t chosen your happiness because of other reasons, please write those in the comments section, and I would try to address those.

You need to choose your happiness and make your happiness a priority in your life. If you don’t do it, who else would do it for you? If you don’t make yourself happy, why would anybody else?

Thank you for reading.

The purpose of this blog to help you find your happiness. Please read the other posts on the blog, and follow so that you get updates when new posts are published. Please share any posts you like with your friends so that they can also find their happiness. If you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments and I would be happy to work on it. If you would like to support my writing and this blog, you may please send a donation through PayPal here.

I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.

Love,

Amarvani