Let's talk about happiness.
What exactly is happiness?
If you search in wikipedia, you gonna find this- Happiness is a feeling ranging from contentment and satisfaction to pleasure and intense joy. A variety of philosophical, religious, psychological and biological approaches have been taken to defining happiness and identifying its sources.
For me, personally, happiness is the moment, when you fill most joy. You can feel happy about many things and reasons. Some are happy, because they like the rain, other, because it's just a sunny day.
I feel happiness, when evrything is going to plan and I meet people, who I enjoy and share ideas.
Also when something new is happening or something exiting, not planning just come to my way.
How about you? What makes you feel happy and joyful?
I feel most happy when my mind is peace. When I am free of want or worry. There is a state of mind in which you accept everything for what it is and don't try to change anything. That, for me, is happiness.
ОтговорИзтриванеI agree with your description of happiness. To feel joy is very important for me mainly because I don't feel real joy very often so whenever it happens I embrace it with full arms. I am happy when I achieve something I have worked very hard for or when I am with a person I could freely talk about all things around me :)
ОтговорИзтриванеI guess to some extent happiness is socially constructed. In the US kids learn from young age to be happy when they do something on their own, whereas in Japan, teamwork is positively reinforced. So happiness many times depends on reinforcement (or punishment). Psychology finds a number of basic predictors about who is going to be happy. So, maybe it is not really about reinforcement - it's about what exactly you learn and perceive as good. Psychologists' recipe is:
ОтговорИзтриване-be helpful
-don't value money
-study what you are passionate about
-work ----||-----
-sleep enough
-exercise
-be spiritual
I think to be light and happy, you also need a bit of ignorance, pink glasses, which prevent you from seeing all the shit happening in Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, whatever, Bulgaria if you will.
I feel happy when I am inspired (when I was working on my project on Tourette's Syndrome; when I read Dear American Airlines; when we played guitars with my professor's husband and son on Christmas Eve; when I share ideas with friends; so on). I feel happy when I play basketball. Also often when I laugh. And every single time I cry!