Thursday, January 19, 2012

"You Bring Your Own Weather To The Picnic"


Gretchen Rubin at The Happiness Project gets novelist Harlan Coben's thoughts about happiness:

Have you ever been surprised that something you expected would make you very happy, didn’t—or vice versa?
Not really. In the end, we know what makes us happy. We also know what makes us unhappy. That’s the irony. We know and yet we still mess it up. That’s part of the human condition, no, and why we need to work on it.

2 comments:

Dan in Philly said...

Tell 2 different men they are now worth $1,000,000. Man 1 has a wife and 4 children and has never made more than $15 and hour his life. That money means the world to him and makes him happy.

Man 2 used to be worth billions and lost it all to real estate/Berie Madoff/dot.com burst/biomedical/savings and loans/nifty fifty crash, and now sees his life's work reduced to a paltry million. His perspective is different and quite likely he's unhappy.

The same condition, two different results in terms of happiness. Is it any wonder that this modern age so obsessed with finding and sustaining happiness has such a hard time? Do we not realize the root of the word is "Hap" meaning chance, or random occurance? Will this hedonistic age ever stop and realize our internal reflections cause happiness far more than anything external - bring your own weather to the picnic, you cannot chance your own good feeling on something as arbitrary as the weather the world might send your way.

Michael Wade said...

Dan,

Thought-provoking points. I believe that gratitude is a major factor. So many of us live in an environment that millions would regard as approaching paradise and yet we grumble. Happiness becomes defined as "Something on the horizon."

Michael