Happiness: The simple truth

A friend recently discussed a book he was reading. I found the concepts he spoke about extremely interesting and worth sharing.

We, human beings, are very bad at judging what really makes us happy. We imagine an experience will bring us lasting happiness but does it really? As an example, if we were asked, would winning a million dollars make you happy? We would jump up and say yes. Why wouldn't it, right? But if you really think about it, the million dollars would make you extremely happy the day you win it, a little happy a week after winning it and a month later, you come back to the same level of happiness you were before you won it. In other words, we all have a baseline level of happiness. These experiences (a million dollars, a handsome partner, a new car, a new job etc.) which we imagine will bring us happiness, do bring us temporary spurts of joy, but never the happiness that stays. We always fall back to our base level of happiness.

Ofcourse this doesn't mean that if we have a really low base level of happiness today, we are stuck with it. There are definitely ways of improving it and the ones I can think of are exercising, socializing, learning new things, community service, healthy living etc.

The point of my post being, we need to stop *waiting* for these big things to happen to us to experience happiness. We need to be happy today! now! at this very moment!! ... to be happy any other day!