The other day, I happened to see an interview with a famous medical doctor on YouTube. As I was casually watching it, he said
He said, “I have never lived my life thinking about happiness.”
I can’t say for sure because I didn’t watch the entire video before and after, but I think that’s what he meant.
I think he meant something like this: “People are unhappy because they think about happiness. Perfect happiness is something that can never be attained, so it is useless to think about it. When I heard this, I understood.
Nowadays, if you look at books, magazines, or the Internet for even a moment, you will find that people are told, “You will be happy if you do . To be happy, you must do . We were born to be happy,” and so on. These phrases are all overflowing with people’s minds.
Anyway, my impression is that everyone wants to be happy. Of course, I want to be happy, too, but perhaps I have never seriously thought about what happiness is.
Happiness is generally money, family, status, and honor. Happiness is considered to be something that can be rephrased. The most extreme example would be that if you have money, you will be happy. The popular FIRE (early retirement) is another example of this trend.
However, this is only relative and not an absolute value. On the other hand, if “happiness” = “money,” life might be easier if it were that clear.
In other words, happiness is subjective and depends on how you feel. To put it in an extreme way, it is a matter of how you feel.
However, since happiness is not well defined, it tends to be vague. If it is not well defined, it tends to be even more vague than the word “dream.
I think the famous medical doctor mentioned above is trying to say that if we seek something that is not concrete, some vague happiness, we will be constantly surrounded by a vague anxiety, and we will tend to make mistakes in life.
The word “happiness” itself was not used in the lives of ordinary people before the Edo period. They did not have time to think about happiness, and they were so busy trying to survive without starving to death that “being alive” was considered to mean “happiness.
Nowadays, the fear of starving to death is gone, and people can choose how to live their lives, such as going on to higher education, finding a job, or marrying a partner.
It would be disingenuous to call this a luxury, but there is nothing more wasteful than to live one’s life thinking oneself to be unhappy. On the other hand, if we convince ourselves that we are happy or blessed, even though we don’t feel that way about ourselves, it can lead to depression, death from overwork, or some other kind of unhappiness.
However, it must be very difficult to avoid thinking about happiness in an age when we have been surrounded by words like “happiness” and “be happy” since we were small children. Especially for those who are jealous of other people’s happiness.
So, what should we do? It may be to focus on something more important than happiness, such as what we want to do or what we want to achieve, and to keep on going.
Then, instead of worrying about where other people’s happiness lies, you will surely be able to look back on your life at the time of your death and think that you were “happy.
See you soon.
