Thinking About Happiness

Every human want to be happy, in fact that is the primary driving force to work. We go to that extra mile just hoping to derive happiness, whether through earning that extra money, or going to a restaurant to eat good food. But, does everyone know what makes one happy? I do not think so!! A recent scientific research study may help to start thinking., according to it: The happiness of people around you has a profound impact on your own personal satisfaction. Like an influenza outbreak, happiness - and misery too - spread through social networks, affecting people through three degrees of separation. For instance, a happy friend of a friend of a friend increases the chances of personal happiness by about 6% . Compare that to research showing that Rs. 5000 increase in monthly income bump ups the odds by just 2%, says James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who led this study. Even people we don't know and have never met have bigger effect on our mood than substantial increases in income," he said. He and colleague Nicholas Christakis, of Boston's Harvard Medical School, made the connection by mining 53,228 social connections between 5124 people who took part in a decades-long clinical study. Fowler and Christakis took a similar approach to document how obesity and cigarette smoking permeated through the same social network. Even more than smoking and obesity, happiness spreads best at close distances, they found. A happy next-door neighbour ups the odds of person happiness by 34%, a sibling who lives within 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) by 14%, and a friend within half a mile by a whopping 42%. "If you drop one pebble in a pond, it will create ripples out from the pebble," he says. "That's not what's happening here. You have a whole handful of pebbles and you're throwing them in the pond at once." Sentiments of a happy person contain its infective spread of happiness. Fowler and Christakis found that each happy contact increases a person's odds of happiness by an average of 9%, while an unhappy contact decreases those odds by 7%.

"I think that happiness is more likely to spread because here's an emotion that's about social cohesion," said Fowler. Visible and contagious happiness might have helped our ancestors maintain social cohesion. It's pleasurable to be near other happy individuals and not near other unhappy individuals." The editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies, and curator of the World Database of Happiness says: "Happy people are typically more involved, are nicer to their kids and their dog, and live longer." Moral of the story then, is be happy and spread happiness around, if you really want to remain happy. Avoid feeling unhappy because your neighbor has achieved phenomenal success that you always wanted in your life. If your motto in life is to be happy, you can be even when you fail to get success. An undergraduate student one told me: I do not know what make people happy, but i can tell you a incidence when i feel happy even condition were not favoring anyone. one day we face a complete power cut in night so all of us was feeling disturbed but suddenly i saw moon in the sky. that moonsight make me so happy at that time i thank to god for that power cut. i forget about next day i forget about my sleep i forget every thing. i was happy just because of that moonsight. What i think is, when a person is doing something from and for his/her heart then s/he feels happy. distinguish between brain and heart, regarding feeling, is indigestible but it is true according to my philosophy. What really is happiness?" i searched the Net and soon discovered a gem: I found that a person named Kuldip Gupta once wrote: A caveman was happy if he got his stomach full. He did not look beyond. That can not be defined as happiness. Its stupor. Desires per se are essential for growth and activity. Annihilation of desires is like killing of Cancer cells by radio therapy , it would kill lot of good cells too. Self centered desires like cancer cells do cause more harm than good though. Yet desires are an essential prerequisite for Human evolution. As defined by Aristotle, Happiness is an activity not a emotion. A contended person sans of any activity would seldom be really happy. The safety catch is that one should not relate the fulfillment of desires with ones inner self or happiness. Happiness must relate to being social, to being an active participant in general well being. An alcoholic maybe on the seventh cloud yet that emotion though devoid of any desires can not be termed as happiness. It has to be independent of desires. Happiness most of the time is an illusion. We perceive well-being, health, wealth, as happiness. All these are conditioned responses. A hand out of our accumulated subconsciousness. As Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, the first philosopher president of the Republic of India said in his book An idealists view of religion the biggest challenge facing the mankind is that they have stopped thinking and have become robot automata. Another good friend of mine once said: We do philosophize about what makes us happy and even more often, what should make us happy. Perhaps, the correct word to use there is contentment, since you cannot seek happiness, you can seek only objects and activities that might bring it to you There are many other common experiences which do not, apparently, support his point of view.

People are often said to be happy while participating in festivities, or attending social gathering like marriages and similar parties. Can we say that everyone attending the party is happy. That must be so, if we were to believe that happiness can be spread through body language. We all know that our moods are dependent on many other factors too, for example boredom or frustration which no kind of body language of people around us can surmount, except perhaps a chuckle of a child closely related to oneself. We all know the symptoms of happiness; a smiling face and a sprightly walk, and also the fact that smiles can often be relaxing tensions and alleviate moods. Is happiness infective? Why is it so, that the body language of certain kind of persons is much more effective in making others feel happy? Those are questions, I think no science has ever attempted to answer that question and any attempts to explain Are there any genetic reasons why some people are happy even under most tumultuous times while others are unhappy in the slightest adversity. I conclude this essay with a link to many thoughts of some very learned persons. Irene-Rakesh