Happiness is Key

I find it fascinating, how, as a society, we gauge success. And of course success is just the beginning, the root of much of humanity, because if we’re all completely honest, how successful we are determines how we’re seen by our peers, colleagues and family members but it’s also how we judge ourselves; success is used as a self-measurement to recognise whether we, as human beings, have achieved our ‘goals’. But does anybody actually realise what success is?

There’s a stigma in Western society, it’s one i’m not particularly fond of, and that’s earning one’s respect; I think it’s a ridiculous approach to life. Business moguls will sit in their ivory towers, peering onto those beneath them in a hierarchal sense but if you analyse it, it’s all just pointless. What I mean is, surely we’re all just striving for happiness? From the homeless guy outside the burger joint, to the wealthy CEO in his ten bedroom house. Who knows, the guy on the streets may have found himself to be enlightened, discovering a sense of eternal happiness, the CEO (despite his wealth) just miserable at the shallowness of his life.They say the Buddhist Monks are the wealthiest amongst us, because they control their minds, they can cast thoughts of doubt and anxiety out of their minds as easily as we dispose of a rubbish bag (see the wash your bowl musing). With this in mind, why are we insistent on basing our prejudices and instinctual reactions on how financially successful a person is? That’s nobody’s actual goal, it’s just a disguise. But why should money be the ticket to happiness?

The point of this article wasn’t to preach ‘Peace and Love man’, although I don’t particularly see anything wrong with that mantra, it was to raise your awareness of just how nonsensical our system is, it favours the few. If you really think about it, we’re trading in happiness, the office workers who commit five days of their week, 9–5, are only striving for happiness, as is their superior and so on. Everything else is irrelevant. So perhaps the definition of an ideal world is not so difficult to imagine,

We’re all striving for our individual goals, often financially motivated. As a student, I don’t think I would consider myself particularly ‘successful’ and i’m certainly aware that society doesn’t view me as a successful individual, apparently we’re bottom of the class system, but I’m content and surely that makes me as successful as anybody else.