One of the first things that people on the brink of goal failure say, including myself, is something along the lines of, "If reaching this goal is preventing me from doing the things that make me happy in life, then what's the point of living like this?" That is a dangerous and presumptuous statement. Dangerous because you're beginning to accept your own failure and presumptuous because your acceptance of this failure is based on bold assumptions.
Assumption #1: The activities or consumerisms that you're missing out on actually make you happy.
Assumption #2: You understand what actually makes you happy.
I'd love to blame assumption #1 on the media, and yes they certainly play their part, but conditioning is also a large part of the equation as well. The road of life is long, but it also has many circles, loops, roundabouts, and repeated streets. Many of the things that "make us happy" are many of the things that feel comfortable. And yes, there is happiness to be found in these activities, but it's often happiness via the path of least resistance or a happiness much less than we could achieve if we only tried harder.
To revisit the road of life analogy: we drive the same road so often that our tires wear deep grooves into the pavement. The road begins to control the vehicle so much so that we don't even have to keep our hands on the wheel anymore, life just goes. Creating goals is all about putting our hands back on the wheel and jerking the tires out of the well worn grooves.
Imagine all of the different kinds of happiness that might be found, if you would just give yourself the chance to experience them. No, scratch that, don't even try to imagine such a thing, it will always fall short of the real feeling. Drinking that Mountain Dew may give you some sense of pleasure, but I guarantee that a glass of water is much closer to happiness.
Let's talk about assumption #2 for a minute. I don't think that human happiness means what it once did. Listening to people describe happiness, with how they are saying it and what they are saying it about, makes me feel like happiness is more commonly used to describe a lack of something negative.
If I ask you, "What makes you happy?", what things come to mind? Most people will rattle off the same first few, like family, friends, and pets. I'm willing to bend the knee on those three, the nouns, but let's talk about what comes next. For me, the next set of answers are things that I want to do more, but for one reason or another happen less frequently than other activities in my life. How can that be... I'm a generally happy person, how can I be a happy person yet not do the things that I feel make me the most happy? It doesn't make any sense. Either I'm not as happy of a person as I think that I am or I'm using the same word, "Happy", in two completely different ways... and truthfully, it's probably a little bit of both.
No, I do not believe that happiness means what we think that it does when we say it. You'll know when someone experienced happiness when they use phrases like "I was really happy" or "It filled me with Pure Joy." The actual wording is less important than the emotion in their voices and language of their bodies as they say it.
I'm not trying to talk down to you. All I'm proposing is that you probably don't know yourself as well as you think that you do(again, I am not the exception to this rule either). Close your eyes and listen to your body. Happiness, like every emotion, is chemical based feeling with roots that draw liquid from everything we see, hear, and do.
"Though many would seek shortcuts to the truth, there is no way around the simplest of tenets: hardship begets achievement and achievement begets joy, true joy, and the since of accomplishment that defines who we are as human beings...
The path to joy is paved in a sense of confidence and self-worth, a feeling that we have made the world a little better, perhaps, or that we fought on for our beliefs despite adversity."
"Drizzt" - In the Novel Sea of Swords
I understand that not everyone wants to impact the world, just as not all beliefs are worth fighting through adversity for. In fact, some beliefs are just flat wrong. However, these are topics for another day, let's talk again soon.
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