There’s a great misunderstanding about what it means to live a happy life, and it can be summed up in the popular symbol of the smiley face.
Now, I like to smile. I love feeling that kind of glowing, delighted state of emotional bliss. It’s wonderful to be full of joy and love and laughter. But feeling those things doesn’t in and of itself make for a happy life; and just because you don’t happen to feel them in the moment doesn’t mean you are unhappy.
In fact, if simply feeling those emotions all the time was what constituted happiness, then it would be a simple matter to find the right combination of drugs that would perpetually bathe our neurons with joyful chemicals, and we could all be perpetually happy.
But this smiley face view of happiness is not the whole story, at all. And we all know it.
A happy life is an engaged life, an active life, an ethical life, a life that you create; a life you can be happy about, a life you can be proud of.
It is not a perfect life.
If you have a view of happiness that tells you that to feel sad or angry or afraid is a sign of failure, or a moral shortcoming of some kind, you’re actually setting yourself up for a miserable bind. The “negative” emotions of life are just as important as the “positive” emotions, in their own way.
Nobody wants to walk around feeling afraid all the time… or angry, or sad. These feelings, in and of themselves, don’t make you happy either.
But they do provide you with important information about what is going on. Used well, they are responses to actual circumstances.
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