Happiness is everything, yes or no?

[Ghost of the dead horse]

Happiness is often portrayed as a catch-all label for emotional well-being. Yet I find there's plenty of stuff going in my head that I see as part of my well-being but doesn't make my happy.

One of those things is knowledge. This goes against the popular saying, "ignorance is bliss". Or does it?

Its easy to see some activities may make people happy for a while, while they can expect something bad to happen from their activity later. In these cases that old saying might be true.

I dont think there's a big emotional content in knowledge for me. I desire knowledge nevertheless, and if I had to attribute a feeling to it, I guess it would be that of contentness.

So we're back to the definition of happiness, and its nature in relation to person's well-being. Is contentness just a sub-category of happiness, or is it different from happiness entirely? Is it possible to summarize a person's emotional and other well-being to a single word? How good of a summary would it be? How would our result improve if we were to use two words? Five?

What I'm trying to do here, I'm trying to paint myself a mental landscape of a person's well-being. Some would recommend me to portray just "happiness", but I would include knowledge, contentness and some others. What would you do?

 

[Evee]

The secret to being happy is being grateful for what you have.. Happiness will not make you grateful, but gratitude will make you happy. It's not hard to be grateful, all you need is to realize what a wonder it is to be alive at all.

 

[Pionart]

You could encapsulate a person's well being through a single word. And yes, contentedness would come under this. You could use subjective well being, or perhaps you could use objective measures of how a person has contributed to the world throughout their life.

The secret to being happy is being grateful for what you have.. Happiness will not make you grateful, but gratitude will make you happy. It's not hard to be grateful, all you need is to realize what a wonder it is to be alive at all.

I started writing in my journal what I was grateful for. I haven't made a habit of it but this is something I would like to do.

It's too easy to focus on what was gone wrong and not on what has gone right.

 

[linear_ringlets]

Happiness, much like many feelings, is fleeting. Feelings in general IMO, are transient. I honestly think we have to choose to be happy. I would rather choose to be content, than to yearn to feel happy all the time. Although happiness is highly sought in our culture, I think it would be a travesty of the human condition to place experiencing happiness before all other emotions.

 

[á´…eparted]

If I am not happy I fail to function properly.

So in a way yes, happiness is everything, and a necessity for me.

 

[sprinkles]

No. Transcendence is.

Mere happiness would have you be at the whims of fate and suffering. There will always be something out to make you unhappy so if you focus on happiness, you may ironically fail to achieve it through fighting all the things trying to take it from you.

If you transcend the problem then you get the keys to everything and happiness becomes a non issue because it's entirely up to you how things go at that point.

 

[SensEye]

Happiness is the end goal of everything everybody does, so I would say it is everything.

I refer to "big picture" happiness in the sense of overall satisfaction/well-being, not short term euphoria or excitement.