Written by a neurology professor, on the meaning of happiness, finding that calling in our lives, off of the Front Page Sections, translated…
On the high-speed rails the individual sitting behind me was on the phones, and, the voice got louder and louder, “I’d worked hard, making all the money for you to go to school, not for you to take some courses in whatever, why would you need to major in happiness? Having the money to go to college, you are, BLESSED, why would you need to spend money on a course like that?……….”
We can close our eyes, refused to see, but we can’t, turn off our ears to not hear, and so, I can only, stand up, to get to the restrooms, to get away from hearing the conversations. As I’d returned back, the man lifted his head, and said hello. I’d looked at him, I knew him, but not that well. He also remembered that I was, a professor too, and asked me, isn’t Harvard and Yale famous schools? Why would they have pointless classes like “the psychology of happiness”?
Turned out, his daughter signed up for this quickly filled-up course, and was happy over it, and called her parents, but, the father believed that this is, a blow-off course, not worthy enough of her school time, and they’d started, arguing.
From before, the universities don’t have classes like this, but recently, it’s been, what’s, trending. One reason being, how more and more people in the world are now, unhappy, anxious, depressed, with the cases of mental disorders, on the rise. In 2018, the American College Health Association’s investigation found, that twelve-percent of college students had contemplated suicide, eighty-seven-percent felt they were overly stressed, forty-three-percent stated the stresses got too much it’d affected them in daily functioning; Great Britain conducted a survey of a hundred universities, a total of 38,000 students, and also found, that about a-third of the students surveyed showed severe signs of mental disorder, and half considered self-mutilating.
This trend is worsened in the adults, the WHO investigated and found, that every forty seconds there’s a suicide in the world. In the past forty-five years, the rate of suicide hiked up sixty-percent; even the suicide rates of teens is at its height in twenty years, out of every 100,000, there are 4.4 suicides, it’d become, the eleventh reason for death. Some school started courses like “Happiness in Life” or “Meanings of Our Lives” to help prevent these tragedies, to help the students define the meanings in their lives, to prevent the tragedies in the futures. I’d asked this dad, to look online for the course descriptions, before he started getting angry, because maybe, his daughter was in need of it.
Currently, the mainstream values are mostly, build on materialism, and without the emotional/psychological facets, that emptiness, that void came. A lot of people couldn’t understand, that what we wanted the most, isn’t necessarily, good for us, I read a novel called, “The Golden Monster”, it’s about the cost of pursuing money as the goal in life, and it’d, thrilled me.
An American study found, that if you make over $75,000U.S annually, your sense of happiness, is equivalent to when you only have $10U.S. in your pockets and found $100U.S. lying on the pavements; a person who’d won the multi-million dollar lottery, the happiness index dropped to 6.7 the following year after s/he’d won, only 0.2 more than ordinary people. And the way we looked, gone with the years too, there are, a ton of beauties since the beginning of time, that refused to let others see them age, and, pursuing youth, would only, upset us more and more.
The true happiness comes from that sense of joy from helping someone out, my father once told, the tangible things, you use, and they’ll be gone, but the intangibles, you use, and, they become more and more, if you have a ton of money, it will, eventually be, used up, but, if you use your wisdom, it would, grow more and more, and the heart of mercy too, grows with shows of kindness to others in the world around us.
Happiness must be, meaningful, the happiness without the meanings, they don’t, last. The younger generations can’t tell the differences between jobs, careers, and callings, and so, they would get lost in the mirages that the money, fame may get them in working. If a person finds her/his callings, then, it wouldn’t matter how much one gets paid, her/his life is, fulfilled.
Life is on finding your own value in existence, being someone who’s needed, that, is what makes life, meaningful. Do one thing right, it sounds like a cliché, but, it’s, the source of, our own, happiness.
And so, this still just showed, how far-fetched our values had, shifted, we’re now all focused on, making the big bucks, getting the high-end cars, houses, etc., etc., etc., without realizing, that we’re, being, trapped by, these, materialistic crap, and that, we’d become, addicted by the day, gaining more and more, things, instead of realizing that the most important value is in helping others in need, because that, is the sort of fulfillment that will, NEVER run out!
Life, the Obstacle Course 