Good morning Steemos,
Not a nutrition or fitness blog today but rather a subject that I have been pondering about lately, HAPPINESS.
Throughout my years of living, working, being married and having a child I have often thought about what you need to be happy. What is the magic formula or the perfect ingredientes in life, that come together to create this very sought after feeling of happiness?
After giving it a good amount of thoughts, I have come to think (rightly or wrongly) that there are 3 main ingredientes that you have to have to even begin to reach anything resembling happiness.
You need HEALTH
You need LOVE
You need WEALTH
In the above holy trinity of happiness, when I refer to wealth I don't mean wealth in knowledge or anything of the kind... I mean MONEY. Hardcore cash!
Throughout life I have come to see thousands of people who have one or two but never all three!
1) People have love and are healthy but poor as church mouses. Or they look like they have money on the outside but it's all a house of cards.
2) People have money and health but walk around with a gold digger next to them (male or female!) or a spouse that is cheating left right and Center - no love.
3) Or there are those who have money and love but are simply not healthy. They are dying in forms of cancer, or have severe depression or are unhappy with their obese bodies or are working themselves to the bone to maintain the money that they have while sacrificing all form of social life work/life balance.
One way or another I have never actually met someone who, by the above measures, would be considered happy. Obviously everything is relative and what I would consider wealth might be peanuts to others or ridiculous standards to others. People also have different definitions of health and love.
Of course there are also always shifts in the trinity. One second you might think you have it all, the love of your life, health and money and then BAM... your partner dies and again you are left with 2 ingredientes only!
So by these measures, I'm now left to wonder, are we as humans ever able to reach happiness or is it all a lie? Are we always pursuing happiness and never actually getting there?
Please do give me your comments as I would love to discuss this further.
I don't agree here with you the only thing you need to be happy is to understand why you are doing things.
Stress can kill happiness. If you're not well-off financially you'll be stressed. If you're not healthy you'll be stressed. If you're not loved you'll feel alone, depressed and stressed eventually. Also I think if you focus on any one of those too much, you may lose at least one of the others. So balance is important. If all a person does is chase money, the love in their life may suffer for it. If all someone does is focus on love, they may end up a poor poet on the streets lol. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the comments. Very well said. Yeah I agree with that stress is a big killer of our time.
To gain something you have to sacrifice something else. Which makes it hard to obtain all 3 while at the same time progress in them all simultaneously. Sometimes we sacrifice health and love to gain wealth. And sometimes we need to focus on health and sacrifice wealth.
I think all 3 can be obtained once you're ok with not progressing much further in them. Once we've reached the desired level, I think that balance @albensilverberg says comes into play.
Trying to balance all 3 while trying to progress in all 3 at the same time, has in my experience, just ended up with people losing focus, getting a slow progress, and becoming mediocre at them all.