Decoding Happiness: Ice cream cannot make you happy

 

-Pratik Badgujar

4 minute read

It does not take a genius to say that we all become happy and sad numerous times. For most of us, happiness giving moments are very few, and the remaining time is filled with frustration and boredom. We all want to be happy. We all do everything we do for the sole reason of becoming happy in life and yet we don't succeed a lot. What is this mystery? Why can't we live happily ever? Can we? In this series of articles, “Decoding Happiness” we will try to understand the reality of happiness. +

In this series of articles we will shed some light on different aspects of happiness one by one. This is the first article of them

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 Ice Cream cannot make you happy

The whole world is unhappy:

If you do a small survey amongst your colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, you will find that almost all of them will say that they are not happy with their lives. How this unhappiness has crept in our lives? Can’t we live happily, ever after, or even better, ever always?

There is a difference between happiness and pleasure. Pleasure is what you get through your senses. What you feel when eating your favorite food, while watching your favorite movie, listening to your favorite singer, is pleasure. Pleasure often leads to happiness but not always.

 

Happiness is a mental, emotional state. We feel happy only when our mind recognizes some experiences like happiness, giving irrespective of what actually the event is. Sounds confusing?

Let me explain:

 

Imagine that a person has just lost a loved one and due to which he is in deep pain. Now, if someone comes and offers him his favourite ice cream and somehow convinces him to eat it, will his sadness and emotional pain vanish immediately after eating the ice cream? Not likely. But why? The sweet, cold, tasty ice cream sensations are the same, yet it is most likely to fail in turning the sadness of person into happiness. This proves that if ice cream had been the cause of joy, the person should have immediately become happy after eating ice cream, even if he is in a moment of profound sadness.

 

Why we become happy?

 

I know it seems a little confusing about reading it for the first time, which’s totally understandable. Most of us have had never thought it before that pleasure and happiness are two different things. This illusion that pleasure= happiness often goes unnoticed because most generally, pleasure and happiness go hand-in-hand.

Consider a poor boy living slums dreaming of owning a car. One day a benevolent car owner allows that boy to just sit in his car. This small, mundane act of just being inside a car, gives that boy immense happiness (and maybe hope too). While on the other hand, a boy born and raised in a family owning a car will rarely feel that happiness. So, it proves that happiness is not caused by action per se but by our perception of actions.

Our mind, by default, categorizes experiences and pleasures into good and bad ‘baskets’. How mind does this is a different topic altogether. Let’s not go into that for now. So, it happens so that if something happens out of the 'good basket', we feel happy. If something happens out of the 'bad basket', we feel sad or angry. Since we all have our personal minds, this categorization is also unique. Hence, different people categorize different activities as good and bad. And that’s also why we see such a huge diversity in interests and likings of people.

Hence, the experience of happiness depends upon happening of events of ‘good basket’. It is the categorization of experience that determines whether we feel happy or sad and not the event per se.

 

How to become happy then?

We all agree that the world is dynamic in nature and not in our ‘control’. Events happen without taking our opinion! And there’s very little that we can do about it. What we can certainly do is change our perception and response to those events and actions.

 

It is essential to understand that pleasures and displeasures are part of life. We need to develop an ability to either ignore or accept displeasure as an inherent part of our journey. This simple idea is powerful enough to eliminate a lot of frustration and dissatisfaction from your life.  

 

 

 

In the next article on decoding happiness, I will throw some light on some simple strategies to implement yourself.

 

 

 

(If you have a doubt or confusion regarding the article or question regarding happiness, feel free to comment it below. We will be more than happy to address it in the next article. You can also email us at simplewords48@gmail.com)