We can all learn something about happiness – after all, you can't know enough about it. So let's start on World Happy Day on March 20, 2021 by clearing a few mistakes about this valuable commodity …
For many people, happiness is one of the most important concepts of all – but what exactly is behind it, only a few can easily put into words. Almost everyone is looking for happiness, but hardly anyone knows for sure where to find it. Everyone wants to be happy, but who knows what to do for it? If there were instructions on how to be happy, it would surely have sold millions of times and made the seller filthy rich, but the question "what is happiness?" not just clarify. However, we can clear up a few misconceptions about happiness – and that's a start.
6 misconceptions about happiness we've all fallen for
"If I achieve [use whatever goal] I am happy."
Often times, we set goals in our life and believe that if we achieve them, we will automatically be happier. Lose 5 pounds, find a man or woman and get married, finally get a promotion and get a raise. But if we get into the habit of tying happiness to conditions and events that will happen in the future, our happiness when reaching a goal will always be short-lived. We will be happy for a moment, but quickly feel restless again and look for new goals and conditions that we have to achieve or think we have to fulfill in order to be satisfied. The American-Israeli happiness researcher Tal Ben-Shahar called this fallacy about happiness "arrival fallacy".
"Anyone who has everything I want must be incredibly happy."
We all have certainly envied people – their relationships, their looks, their jobs, their financial wealth, and so on. However, the assumption that it makes them happy to have what we want is a fallacy. Because happiness is highly individual. "What happiness is, differs from person to person," write the physician Dr. Michael Kunze and the journalist Dr. Silvia Jelincic in her book "Der Glückskompass". "Depending on the initial situation, personality and attitude to life, personal happiness differs from what the majority would consider happiness." In other words, to orientate oneself towards others or towards socially recognized life plans in the search for individual happiness can lead to bad misery – and on top of that into unhappiness.
"Success makes you happy"
Success and happiness are seen by many as closely related, with the causality that success is the prerequisite for satisfaction. That this is a mistake is shown by numerous examples of obviously successful people who were not happy – e. B. Michael Jackson or Robin Williams. Whether, on the other hand, luck might make you successful, certainly depends on how you define success for yourself. But maybe a person who is really happy doesn't really care about success …
"I only miss XY to be happy."
Often we tend to see the cause of our dissatisfaction in what we lack. But the truth is that the reason is that we focus on these things. If we instead concentrated on the things we have, we would probably feel a lot happier – even though our external situation has not changed and we are still missing various things.
"Happiness is a gift of chance."
Some people think that being happy is out of their control. But we can actually contribute a lot to our happiness. The personal attitude, the way we see the world and what we expect play a big role in our feeling of happiness. For example, we can get into the habit of appreciating supposedly small things such as our health or our lifetime and being grateful for them, which in most cases will have a long-term effect on happiness. Those who are happy do not owe this to chance, but above all to themselves. But …
"You make your own luck."
… the opposite is not true: if you are unhappy, it is usually not your own fault. Happiness cannot be forged like a horseshoe, but depends on both external and internal factors. Some people find easier access to themselves and can Thanks to their mindset, they even feel happy despite severe strokes of fate, others fail to do so, although their life situation looks quite relaxed from the outside. Sometimes certain events lead to the fact that a person suddenly gains an insight and after a long, lost search the path to happiness opens up out of nowhere. Sometimes someone who has always been happy is forever struck by change. Everyone may be the blacksmith of their own fortune – but whether we have the necessary equipment that we personally need for forging is not in our hands.
Sources used: "The Happiness Compass. All the Knowledge in the World in One Book", psychologytoday.com