Happiness paradox: Don't go after happiness or you'll never find it

Humans go to great length to achieve happiness. The only rationale behind living is to achieve gratification in some form or the other. Despite the fact that every human action is inclined towards achieving happiness, a large number of people on earth are unsatisfied with their life.

Yeah it’s true that absolute happiness is a dead man’s fortune, but we can do a lot of things to maximize happiness. To be happier, it’s important to understand the nature of happiness. Doing something solely to receive pleasure will never make us happy because happiness is experienced in little moments of in-attention. As William Benet puts it, “Happiness is like a cat. If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you. It will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go by your business, you’ll find it rubbing up against your legs and jumping into your lap”.

Happiness is a family of related emotional states, such as joy, amusement, satisfaction, gratification, euphoria, and triumph. Everyone wants to be happy. The motive of true altruism is seriously challenged by something called psychological egoism, which states that even a philanthropist is selfish about finding an inner sense of happiness that ostensibly results from helping others selflessly. But unfortunately, despite a lot of things people do to live a happy life many of them are unable to find happiness. It’s because they don’t understand the illogicality behind ‘Hedonism’.

It’s important to educate people about the paradox of pleasure, and motivate them to focus on productivity, rather than going about in pursuit of eudemonia(absolute happiness). Happiness will follow only if you stop following it and go about your business. The essence of a happy life lies in identifying one’s signature strengths and using it every day to reach the state of ‘flow’.