Tuesday 20 March is International Day of Happiness when we are encouraged to make the world a happier place. So, how will you be celebrating? asks Ellie Smith
So will you be leaping out of bed with a spring in your step and a smile on your face, blasting out the Pharrell Williams hit Happy while skipping into work? Possibly not. For most of us, it’s more likely it’ll be a pretty average March Tuesday; but with all the talk about ways to enhance our happiness, it’s easy to feelbad about not feeling happy.
As a society, we seem to be obsessed with happiness — more than ever before. A quick Google search for the word yields millions of results, and there are thousands of books about the topic for sale on Amazon. Mo Gawdat, Google’s chief business officer, recently created the first equation for happiness, which requires balancing experiences and expectations, and his Channel 4 interview discussing it became the channel’s most downloaded video ever.
But what is happiness? The Dalai Lama, who has spent a lifetime pondering happiness and suffering, defines it thus: “Since our goal and the purpose of life is happiness, what is happiness? Sometimes physical suffering can even bring a deeper sense of satisfaction like with an athlete after a gruelling workout. So ‘happiness’ means mainly a sense of deep satisfaction. The object of life or our goal, then, is satisfaction.”
However it is defined, happiness is now seen as something we can measure. National leaders worldwide are giving it more recognition: since 2012, the UN has been producing an annual World Happiness Report, which ranks 155 countries by their happiness levels.
But has our pursuit of happiness gone a bit too far? Has the pressure of striving to be constantly content with our lives created a paradox in which, in a quest to be happy all the time, we might actually be making ourselves sad?
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