Is Happiness A Choice?

[BritNi]

I discovered this comment in the forum, and I hope you don't mind, @Deleted member 16771, but I'm going to pick on you for just a moment.

This comment piqued my curiosity. I am hoping that you'll elaborate on this philosophy. I'm not saying I disagree. I am just seeking further insight and discussion.

I'm hopeful others with chime in and state their opinions as well. What does everyone think?

you can't really fake happiness. We don't control happiness. We can entice it into our lives with other feelings we can control, like gratitude and serenity, but happiness is a cat.

It's sneaky, and it can appear out of the blue; it pounces and slinks - both towards and away. Sometimes it decides to stay, other times it prefers the neighbour lady.

What I'm understanding: Your depiction of happiness is as if it's an external force or energy. It lives outside of our physical selves, and it's only when we come into contact with its force we experience happiness. ....AND....
We can call it to us: "Yoo hoo.... happiness, I'm thinking of petting puppies and stuff, come to me." So for a moment it stays with us, but it comes and goes at it chooses? It seems as if you're perceiving it from a sociological perspective.

What is the driving force of the state of happiness you describe? You say that it's not something that can be faked... but, what about the idea of "fake it til you make it?"

Is happiness not biopsychological?
Do you believe that it's possible to condition ourselves to be happy?
Do you believe that we can "exercise" our minds well enough that we can in turn control it?

 

[Pin]

I don't believe in free will or choice.

 

[BritNi]

I don't believe in free will or choice.

Do you feel like you're a primarily happy person?

 

[Pin]

Do you feel like you're a primarily happy person?

Yeah, I'm fortunately doing what I want to most of the time. I also don't have clinical depression.

 

[BritNi]

Yeah, I'm fortunately doing what I want to most of the time. I also don't have clinical depression.

So... what is the source of your happiness? Do you seek ot or does it come to you? Or, is it just always there?

 

[JennyDaniella]

Honestly, I’m a fake it till you make it person. Despite hurdles and struggles through some circumstances throughout life, I have chosen to be positive and upbeat. I’ve gone through a lot setbacks and hurt in my life, but I still choose to find happiness in every small aspect. Life is short. The average human only lives 27,000 days. Why waste it being miserable and negative?

Of course, there will be bad days. And that’s okay. It’s perfectly fine to have bad days, and and once you do, let yourself feel those emotions and let them out. You’re human, life will be like the ocean, never standing still and sometimes coming in big waves.

What matters is that you pick yourself back up and conquer the day with a smile. Find happiness in the small things in life. A cup of coffee, telling your loved ones how much they mean to you, kissing your beloved pet, feeling the sun on your skin or smelling the rain. Live life!

It is short, so spend it wisely.

 

[JamieUK92]

Honestly, I’m a fake it till you make it person. Despite hurdles and struggles through some circumstances throughout life, I have chosen to be positive and upbeat. I’ve gone through a lot setbacks and hurt in my life, but I still choose to find happiness in every small aspect. Life is short. The average human only lives 27,000 days. Why waste it being miserable and negative?

Of course, there will be bad days. And that’s okay. It’s perfectly fine to have bad days, and and once you do, let yourself feel those emotions and let them out. You’re human, life will be like the ocean, never standing still and sometimes coming in big waves.

What matters is that you pick yourself back up and conquer the day with a smile. Find happiness in the small things in life. A cup of coffee, telling your loved ones how much they mean to you, kissing your beloved pet, feeling the sun on your skin or smelling the rain. Live life!

It is short, so spend it wisely.

Wise words from my earth angel! The smell of rain is so good! You are totally right in what you say... it’s very easy to lose sight of the finer details in life

 

[Pin]

So... what is the source of your happiness? Do you seek ot or does it come to you? Or, is it just always there?

Emotions come and go.

I'm just more focused on my goals, to tell you the truth. I don't have much time for things like sadness, offense, a bruised ego, or a broken heart.

The bottom line: I want to be president.

 

[JennyDaniella]

Wise words from my earth angel! The smell of rain is so good! You are totally right in what you say... it’s very easy to lose sight of the finer details in life

Indeed my Jamie

 

[Pin]

Life is too short to get distracted by powerful emotions and passing trivialities.

You have to have a long-term goal in mind to keep yourself grounded, on course, and ethical.

Life is a war and each day a battle.

 

[Infjente]

I don't believe in free will or choice.

I would never have guessed that

 

[Infjente]

I believe the level and frequency of happiness, is depending on your baseline and perception of contrasts

 

[Asa]

Attitude is a choice. Positive and negative attitudes influence happiness (both your own happiness and the happiness of those around you). A positive attitude influences one's life to be happier, healthier, more fun, and more fulfilling.

Happiness is not necessarily a choice. Depression is not a choice.

Our life choices can influence our happiness. Not all people have the luxury of changing their lives, or perhaps they have the luxury to make one change, but not another. If you have the freedom to make choices, you can change your life to be happier: move, find a different job, choose the person you marry or divorce, move to a different country, etc. People in war-torn, impoverished places, and places with restricted human rights find happiness.

We also have control over setting our values of happiness. We decide what measure of happiness relationships, people, spirituality, traditions, family, career, accomplishments, possessions (and the hierarchy of one's possessions), freedom, home, the region or country we live in, hobbies, leisure time, etc, will have.

Aspects of life such as depression, low self esteem, PTSD, pain, illness, suffering abuse, etc, influence our happiness. Despite the ability to try to navigate them in healthy ways, we cannot control them. We can always control attitude. And that doesn't mean you have to act "happy" all the time. A good attitude can be fluid, accepting, nurturing....

 

[Ren]

"Happiness does not consist in pastimes and amusements but in virtuous activities ... [It] is a state of activity." — Aristotle

 

[Wyote]

I believe the level and frequency of happiness, is depending on your baseline and perception of contrasts

"Happiness does not consist in pastimes and amusements but in virtuous activities ... [It] is a state of activity." — Aristotle

These two sum up my intimations about happiness. You can improve it to some degree through perception and activity.
You're never a hopeless victim of the sads. And you must embrace some level of non-happiness with a "happy heart" to keep on moving.

 

[Ginny]

Happiness is found within the self, but it is influenced by circumstance. You can try to always look at it from a favourable perspective to make a bad situation less influential, but the influence persists.

Faking happiness makes you feel more alone inside yourself because there is no way of cleansing yourself from it. So in a way Host is right by saying that you can't do it, because you merely assume an outer shell that is increasingly different from the core. It will continue to affect you, even if you use the fakery to influence your perception - you'd still be lying to yourself. I prefer clear sight over fakery. You may be less happy, but at least you know where you stand and enable yourself to find a way to change the circumstances.
After all, if you fake it, who's to say that you can even identify the right circumstances to let go of? Or that you attract any form of favourable circumstances if you do? I believe the inside affects the outside at least just as much as the outside affects the inside. If you make yourself miserable by assuming a shell of happiness within a bad situation, it is more likely that you attract unfavourable circumstances than ones that would make you truly happy. Of course, I'm referring to big situations here, not everyday bits and pieces. There it becomes a more fine-tuned balance of managing perceptions and needs.

 

[sassafras]

This is a complex question.

For starters, I will say that we as a society have come to place too much value on comfort and what we feel. I don't blame us for it. Nature has designed us to make survival a goal and in lieu of no longer having to work as hard to satisfy the necessities, we've come to equate comfort with survival and comfort with pleasurable feelings. And this is further warped by idealistic schools of thought and cultural conditioning. Happiness, for many people, has come to mean a mountaintop where one experiences a perpetual state of peace and ease; if for whatever reason, we are not in this idealized state, something is wrong and we need to fix it.

Which is fine. Everyone has something in their lives that they can improve upon and the contrasts we experience illuminate these for us; I truly believe our flaws represent our life's work. We're meant to troubleshoot and overcome the challenges encoded in our DNA, to better our lives, our bodies, our modes of thinking and feeling and then pass on these findings to our (literal or proverbial) children. We are both sculptor and clay. We are imperfect engineers and we are going to make mistakes. We are supposed to make mistakes so we can grow and change and bring us closer to ease and comfort and streamlining our lives.

But we're also supposed to experience the full spectrum of human emotion. This is our guidance system. It's perfectly normal to experience both negative and positive emotions. It's perfectly normal for happiness to sometimes last less than five minutes. It's also perfectly normal to respond badly to disappointment; depending on the nature of the setback and how proportional it is to our present feelings about self-worth, it's not unusual to spend a few days (or even weeks) working through those feelings. There is nothing wrong with feeling bad for a time-- even if you don't have a conscious reason for it just yet. It means something is about to float to the top and you're being asked to work through it and this is HEALTHY.

The trouble is, most of the time, we don't let ourselves do that. We heap all these expectations on what it is we're supposed to feel and what we're supposed to pursue according to everyone but ourselves. We prize our comfort too much, and when we emphasize our comfort over our growth, we stagnate and end up stewing in those feelings that are meant to just be passing through. We also disrupt our own peace and happiness by constantly scanning the horizon for threats, looking for reasons why it won't last, why we don't deserve it, who is going to come and take it away. And living in this constant state of fear and doubt blinds us to our truths.

We just don't let ourselves be.

In that sense, I think @Deleted member 16771 is right in that he says happiness is a cat. You can't force a cat to do anything. Fixating on it and trying to capture it won't make it come to you any quicker; it may even avoid you for a time. But if you cultivate the right environment and let it come to you, you will have it. Much like you will have everything else. All your emotions are cats. You can't control them. So just go about your day and don't worry too much about which one is purring in your lap at the moment. They all have a place.

The only thing you CAN control is developing your awareness to recognize when you're holding onto one particular 'cat' too long to the detriment of the rest. For example, if you've been holding onto Disappointed Kitty for weeks at a time, its possible that you haven't put out the feeding bowl for Happy Kitty or Curious Kitty in a while; it may be time to gently shoo Disappointed Kitty off your lap and invite it to come back only once you've made sure everyone else has been properly fed and petted and your responsibilities aren't piling up around you. It could be that you've been overindulging Disappointed Kitty and that's why he's been in your lap for as long as he has...

So happiness to me isn't so much as a choice as it is a series of choices that allow you to structure an internal environment of flow that thrives on your acceptance of self as a flawed but perfectly normal human. If you let go and let things be, it'll be easier for you to reach for happiness and have it come to you... and also easier for you to cope when it decides to take its own way around the couch before it settles into your lap for the night.

 

[Infjente]

If happiness is a cat, then confidence must be a dog? You can fool the dog, but you can't fool the cat

 

[Ginny]

If happiness is a cat, then confidence must be a dog? You can fool the dog, but you can't fool the cat

Why is confidence a dog?

 

[Wyote]

If happiness is a cat, then confidence must be a dog? You can fool the dog, but you can't fool the cat

You can fool them both but one will run away and the other will remain blindly steadfast