Could We Be Any Happier?
I recently ran a poll on my facebook page which asked my readers which one out of four categories (health, money, happiness or time) they would like to have or experience more of (feel free to add your vote!).
It was interesting to see that happiness was in third place out of the four categories, with time and health being more popular and money having no votes at all. Now, given that over 200 people saw the poll, but only 12 people voted, I guess I can’t call it a scientifically proven observation, but for the purposes of putting a blog post together, I find the results quite interesting.
Did the results indicate that happiness isn’t as elusive as we’re led to believe? In other words, we are happy, after all; or, the flipside interpretation could be telling us that if we had better health and more time, we’d feel happier. In reality I put the poll up just for fun, and my observations are just that and don’t take into account the context in which the choice was made so it’s difficult to draw any sound conclusions, but let’s just explore the concept of happiness.
So what is happiness and what makes us happy? Happiness is one of those strange, personal, intangible things that we often don’t notice we’ve experienced until the moment has passed. It’s often compared to catching butterflies, but actually I think a better description would be catching faeries which (depending on your beliefs) are illusory and intangible and to the best of my knowledge have never been caught. They reside only in our imagination and maybe that’s where happiness dwells also, forming part of our perceptions of our life experiences?
