Until and unless you know how to find your happiness, you would not be able to pursue it. There are essentially two steps to a happy life. First finding your happiness and then pursuing it. As the author of the happiness blog I must share with you what I think I know about finding happiness.
Most people are not able to pursue their happiness because to start with, they don’t know what it is. You need to know what it is to be able to pursue it. As a society, we are not taught how to find our happiness, and so we have formed meaningless goals for ourselves- purposeless reproduction, the curse of materialism being couple of those meaningless goals.
Money by itself is not wrong. It can even make you happy if you use it in the right direction. But, most people don’t even care to know what the right direction for their lives is. They just go in the direction of the herd, simply because it is comfortable to go in the direction of the herd.
If you want to lead a happy life, you would have to find out how to find your happiness, and then once you do that, find the guts to pursue it, which is the harder part of the equation. However, in this post, we would focus on the first part- how to find your happiness.
Since the school and the college culture doesn’t care enough, we need to find our own ways. I have struggled throughout my life to try to find my own happiness. However, the good news is that unlike most people, I haven’t given up or compromised with life.
So, I think I can help you find your happiness. Let’s get into it. How to find your happiness?
1. Start with self-awareness to find your happiness
No matter who you are, and what your life stage is, the first step to finding your happiness is self-awareness. You need to understand yourself well to be happy. Ideally, this process should start in the childhood, but unfortunately, it doesn’t.
In order to understand yourself, you need to ask yourself important questions about your motivations, strengths, weaknesses etc. Here are a few questions to get started with:
- Why do I do what I do?
- What kind of people make me happy?
- When am I the happiest naturally?
- When am I miserable?
- What would I do if money wasn’t a problem?
- What do you love so much that you are willing to pay to do it?
These are some of the questions to start with on your journey of self-awareness. You can add your own questions. The purpose of the self-awareness exercise to arrive at an understanding of yourself. More importantly, this is a continuous process, since you would keep evolving as a person, and hence you would need to keep assessing who you have become.
Self-awareness is important to happiness because unless you make a conscious effort to understand who you are, you would not be able to design a life around self-awareness, which is the basis of a happy life.
2. Find your life purpose and write it down
The second step to finding your happiness is finding your purpose. Your purpose is your reason for existence. Why should you do anything? Your purpose should define the kind of life you live, and why you want to live the kind of life you live. The root of purpose is in self-awareness and that is why you cannot find your purpose without being self-aware.
Therefore, self-awareness and purpose are the basics of happiness. They are interconnected. Once you are self-aware, you would be able to arrive at a purpose of life, which would guide you towards your happiness.
3. Start organizing your work life around your purpose
Now, begins the hard part. Self-awareness and purpose are the key elements of the theory of happiness. They don’t change for anyone. All human beings, if they are to be happy, must invest in self-awareness and finding their personal mission of life.
After you begin to become self-aware and find a purpose to life, you can get started on your journey to happiness. Once you have a purpose to your life, you would need to organize the key elements of your life around your purpose.
The first key element of your life is your work. You would need to reassess what you do, and if it aligns with your purpose. If it does, you should already be feeling quite happy at work. If you don’t, then you would need to see how you can do what would make you happy professionally.
May be, you would need to find another job that would make you happy, even at a lesser pay. May be you would need to start a business. These are things that take time, thought and effort.
However, unless and until you have aligned your work life with your purpose, you would not be able to find your happiness in your heart. Since most of us spend most of our waking hours at work, it is important that we extract joy out of it. Unfortunately, the society isn’t designed for it, not in the 21st century. Therefore, it would be hard to do it, but there is no other way out, if you want to be happy.
4. Start eliminating things you hate doing – to find your happiness
You won’t find happiness in things you hate doing. We don’t have to do what we hate- not for anything. Happiness is a direction for life, just like social conformity. Social conformity leads to misery, because the society is a miserable place.
You want to be happy. So, there is no way you can continue to do things you hate. Slowly, as you discover your purpose and become more self-aware, you would realize that things you hate don’t fit into your purpose. Your purpose would be to somehow, using your natural strengths and talents, passion, make the world a better place.
You can’t make the world a better place doing things you hate.
You cannot be happy doing things you hate. So, as a step to finding your happiness, start eliminating stuff you hate.
5. Assess your personal and social relationships
What kind of people you hang out with? The people you spend time with, must know about your purpose and your renewed sense of self-awareness. It is hard to have people around who do not believe in your vision to become a happier person.
People who love you and care for you, want you to be happy. People who don’t love you and not care for you don’t care about your happiness.
If the people around you do not believe in your happiness, you would find it quite hard to even get started on your journey to become a happier person.
6. Assess your values to find your happiness
Understanding what you value is a part of the self-awareness process. However, it is not easy to understand what we value and we can only understand it over time, after we have seen a bit of life. As a part of finding your happiness, you would need to be conscious about your values. If you are not happy, perhaps you have not been paying attention to your values.
For example, you may realize that you value independence as an individual over love. Love cannot flourish when the people involved in the relationship value independence over inter-dependence, which is the basis of a successful relationship.
What you value as a person should guide your personal as well as professional life. Only when your days are aligned with your values, you would be able to find your happiness.
7. Understand the difference between fleeting and sustained happiness
We are talking about sustained happiness. The problem with most of the world right now is that it is living on fleeting happiness. Sustained happiness can only be created on the basis of self-awareness, purpose and values’ based life.
Fleeting happiness comes from weekends, holidays etc. Fleeting happiness is the outcome of a life that lacks awareness and a sense of purpose. If you keep rushing your life from a weekend to weekend, that’s wasting over 70% of your life, while believing that true happiness is not possible.
If you want to be happy, you need to go after sustained happiness that you can feel and enjoy on an everyday basis.
8. Do not rush into the process of finding your happiness
I know, you might say, all this is easier said than done. Yes, I agree. Most of us are not brought up with an outline to live a happy life. Our parents were not happy much, and they did not know or care about happiness either.
If you have spent 3 decades or more as an unhappy person, just doing things they told you to do, it will not be easy to undo all the damage and restart on your journey to find your happiness. So, please do not rush this process. This is a set of things you would need to do to start to become a happier person.
However, it will take some time to be self-aware, and practice it. It will take some time to arrive at a purpose of life, and you could always change the phraseology of the purpose, till it motivates you to live a worthy and happy life.
Do not rush the process.
9. Do not give up on your happiness
I exhort you, to not give up on your happiness. Unfortunately, we live in a world where most people have already given up on their happiness. They do what they do to please their families, to please the society or whoever else. Most folks just don’t care about how they feel inside anymore. They have taught themselves that happiness is a chimera which cannot be attained.
I am here to tell you that happiness is possible. Your happiness is possible. You just have to be courageous enough to seek it. The wise man said that those who seek shall find. What you seek, seeks you.
10. Persist, persist, and persist, till you find your happiness
Considering that we live in a world where the majority of the human compromise with life, happiness is a rarity. How long should you try to find your happiness? Does the question even matter?
You should try to find your happiness till you live, and once you find it, you must take every step possible to pursue it. There is nothing else there to life. The purpose of our lives is to be happy. The purpose of your life is to be happy. If you are not happy, you know that your life is a failure, regardless of what you may have achieved materially or in the eyes of the world. Your happiness lies inside of you and it is your responsibility to yourself to find it, and pursue it.
Persist till your find your happiness.
In Conclusion– how to find your happiness
The two basic steps to finding your happiness are self-awareness and purpose. The more you understand yourself, your values, your passions, the closer you would be to writing down a purpose that becomes the foundation for a happy life. It is your duty to yourself to find your happiness, and once you have found it, to pursue it relentlessly.
Most people don’t find their happiness since the society isn’t structured around happiness. Will you find yours?
Thank you for reading.
Why do I write this blog?
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