How long would you wait to be happy. Stop procrastinating on things that would make you happy. Start to create happiness. Start doing the things that would make you happy today. They would tell you that you need to wait, and life would be over.

Hey, I know, people have been telling you to wait till you finish your school to be happy and do the things that you enjoy. They have been telling you to finish college to do the things you enjoy, and then you could be happy. They have been telling you that you can get married and then do whatever you want.

All your life, people have been saying that you need to wait to be happy. Wait for education to finish, find a job, get married, have kids, and then you realize one day that life would be over and you don’t have any time to wait anymore, to be happy. Do not wait to be happy. We do not know how long do we have here. Happiness is in the journey not in the destination.

How do we experience happiness now?

We need to realise that we are all mortals and we aren’t given eternity. So, our attitude to life needs to reflect this reality. We can’t wait! It doesn’t make sense to wait. We can’t waste our life waiting for tomorrow, day after or 10 years later. Unfortunately, most people spend even longer than that to find their happiness. Most people never find it. Why is that so?

The society isn’t wired around happiness, but success.

This is the biggest problem why people do not find their happiness. The society doesn’t respect happiness. We are all social animals, and we live with a bunch of people, which is in general called the society. What does the society respect?

The society can only respect what it can see, what is tangible. It cannot respect what I cannot see. Therefore, it doesn’t respect happiness because happiness is not seen outside, but is felt inside. If you are happy, you cannot paste it on your chest and go around telling people that you are happy. People will think you are a fool.

However, if you are successful, people would respect you, you will gain status in society, you will find friends who live the same kind of life, and hence you will think in the beginning that you are in the right direction.

So many people can’t be wrong right?

Actually, that’s the problem with majority. Majority is mostly fucked up.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect)” -Mark Twain

The problem with the majority thinking approach is that there is so much comfort in numbers that people do not dare to think beyond the majority opinion. They believe if so many people do the same thing, it must be right.

But…the majority is not happy

If the majority is not happy, then there must be something wrong. The world is not a happy place and if what the majority was doing right, the world would be a happier place. People wait to be happy for their whole lives and by then they realise, that their lives have passed them by.

What needs to be done?

Start living in the now. No matter how old you are, you need to accept that you are not happy, if you are not happy, and then stop waiting. It will take you some time to organize your life in a manner that you don’t wait for happiness. It won’t happen overnight. If you wasted 40 years of your life running in the wrong direction waiting for your happiness, in order to reorient your life towards being happy every day, you will need to make a few changes.

1. Change how you set goals to create happiness

Why do you set a particular goal? Choose goals where you would enjoy the process of achieving the goal, and not only for the destination. There is absolutely everything wrong with a goal whose process of achieving is painful. If the journey is painful, it is quite likely, that the destination will be painful as well.

Stop making goals which are painful to achieve. Things you are good at, are not painful to achieve. Yes, they do need hard work, but you enjoy the hard work and not dread it. I have been working pretty hard on this blog and in fact have written over 100,000 words within this year, but I do not dread the process of achieving it. I enjoy writing, and hence this hard work is not painful.  My destination for this blog is to one day get hundreds and thousands of visitors, but do I enjoy the process? Yes.

However, in the past, I did set goals which were extremely painful to achieve. I hated the work that went in to achieving the goals but I told myself that I would be happy when I have achieved those goals. Years of my life went wasted just like that and now I can’t even recover those years.

Does it pain?

Yes, it does pain, and that’s the reason I am telling you to stop waiting to be happy. Seize the day and figure out how to be happy today.

2. Do things that make you happy TODAY to create happiness today

You are waiting till your retirement to do the things that make you happy. It could be anything. It could be wanting to start a business, become a comedian, a writer, a painter or anything else. You need to organize your life in a way that you get to do what you want to do today.

Stop watching television and remove wasteful activities from your life. Make time for things you care about. It is not easy to quit your job and you may have a lot of family responsibilities but create a schedule where you are able to make some time for who you really want to be.

3. Fix your relationships for creating happiness

We do not need unhappy relationships in our lives, even if they are blood relations. The only reason relationships should exist is because they make us happy. If relationships aren’t mutually happy, they do not deserve to exist. It is pointless to drag them unnecessarily, if they aren’t happy.

The relationships do not make us happy, do not deserve to exist. It is easier said than done, but we need to figure out a way to apply this principle in our lives.

4. Realize that wanting to be happy is a great start

The fact that you want to be happy is a great start. Most people are a living pretense and they don’t even admit that they are unhappy. If you are not honest with yourself about your problems, there is no way you are going to solve them. You already have a head start over people who haven’t really thought about their happiness.

In a world that doesn’t take care of its happiness, you would be labelled a rebel for trying to be happy and that’s okay. If you want to be happy, that’s a pre-requisite.

5. Absolutely STOP caring about what other people think of you

In order to create happiness, stop giving a fuck about what people think of you. We just discussed that the majority of the society is not happy. Now, if you care about their opinions of your life, you would be caring about opinions of people who are not happy but rather miserable. You need to completely stop caring about what other people think of you, as long as happiness is the goal. Happiness is inner work. If you want to be happy, you need to remove all external parameters of measurement from your life.

You need to start the inner work of making yourself happier today.

6. Design your life around what makes you happy

Find people who want to help you on your journey of happiness. You will need help on the way. Start making a network in the area where your interests lie and start doing those things, whatever they are. You will also need the support of your family and it will decide where or not you will make it on the journey of your happiness.

If your family supports you, consider yourself fortunate, and make them a partner on your journey. However, when they do not support you, you will want to work alone, till they understand your need for happiness. If they still don’t understand you, you will have to go ahead in spite of their disagreement.

7. Start with the little things that bring you joy

Although fundamental changes would take time, you can begin to reclaim your happiness now. Start by addressing your happiness in every small decision that you make.

What colour do you feeling like wearing today- red? Make sure you wear red.

What food do you want to have for dinner-lasagne? Make sure you have a lasagne.

Once you start caring about the small things that make you happy, you will realize how beautiful happiness feels and you would want the bigger chunks of joy that would only come when you make the big changes you need to make to create that level of happiness.

8. Persevere to create happiness

Once you find what makes you happy and you decide to experience it today, it will take some time before you are able to live that reality in your everyday routine. There will be times when it will feel so difficult that you would be tempted to give up and if you give up, you will never find happiness that you truly crave for.

Please try and understand that your happiness is the most important part of your life and if you give up on it, you will never find it. So, stay on course with the journey, till you ensure that you have created a life where happiness is a part of your everyday routine.

9. Start with what you have to start creating happiness for yourself

In order to start on the journey of your happiness, start with what you have. Start with the skills, network, and education, lessons that you have and use them to move in the direction of your happiness. Do not disclose your plan to the rest of the world because most people wouldn’t care and their opinions would only distract you from focusing on what you are trying to focus on.

Start making your hands dirty in the new field that you want to enter. Start writing poetry, painting, dancing, whatever it is that you think makes you happy and learn on the go. We learn and grow only by doing. We can spend all our lives doing theory and would learn faster in an hour of action.

So, stop thinking about what you want to do to make yourself happy, and start doing it already.

10. Believe it is possible to create happiness

What you believe, is. I am sure one of the reasons most people do not shoot at their happiness is because they truly believe that it is not possible to create a life doing what they love. They don’t believe in their ability to create happiness, and so it doesn’t reflect in their lives. Unfortunately, since they haven’t experiences it themselves, they pass on the same beliefs to the next generation which is also then subject to a life of boredom and monotony.

I am telling you that it is possible. I haven’t completely realized it yet, but I have experienced it multiple times during my journey of the last few years trying to create a happier life, that I don’t think it is possible, but I know that it is.

There we are, talking about why you must not wait to be happy. Hey, I request you to not wait. I exhort you. I am 39, and frankly, I have seen many people die who were younger to me, and I know that death could be around the corner anytime. You know it, too. By the time you reach the point where you want to do the things that make you happy, there may not be any time left. So, please stop waiting to be happy. Be happy today. There is every reason to.

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