How Can One Learn to Live a Happy Life?

So how to live a happy life? Does success make you happy? Does earning a name and a shit lot of money make one truly happy? Go and observe people around you who are filthy rich, and observe if they are living each and every moment with happiness and enjoyment.

The truth of the matter is, the more success he has amassed the more likely he is to be under pressure and stress. Who do you think is under more stress, an employee, or a CEO?

Success is not Happiness! Living a Happy Life is Real Success

Having said that, you don’t have to go behind the barn and shoot your career right in the face. Money has its own value and it’s indisputable.

Some insane crazy people misunderstand the essence and context of what I mean by this. Of course, you need a career where you can excel. You need to earn money to live a comfortable life, but it is not related to happiness. Just like you need fuel to drive a car, but you don’t drive a car to keep filling fuel all your life. Similar is the importance of money.

Let The Treasure Hunt Begin

Do we really know how to live a Happy Life?

We need to understand how do we actually become happy, or how do people in this world become happy.

Happiness is no longer a choice but a need. Every human in this world is just trying to fulfill this basic need through different routes. We just have to understand how the world is acting to fulfill this need, and if there is another option to achieve this necessity. I say yes there is. It is something that is beyond how most people think or act.

To walk down this path, you have to leave behind all your pre-conceived notions and thinking you have formed over your life; which is manufactured by some schmucks, marketed and branded by the society, and ultimately distributed and retailed through our relationships (people you live with). I am sure there are only a handful of them in this world who have had the courage to think in this manner.

If you wanna grasp it as well, you gotta empty your mind first. And after seeing my point of view, it is up to you, whether to take it in your heart and follow it, or label it as BS and live the way you have been living. If we sum up our lives, then what is left of it, besides the struggle to be happy?

The Mind Game to Understand ‘Happiness’

Any desirable thoughts, feelings, emotions related to something don’t actually give us real happiness. A desire or a thought that “this should be mine”, doesn’t give us true happiness, including the desire of a person.

It’s only as long as the relationship is good, that it keeps us happy, but the minute it turns sour, things take a u-turn.

But what is the actual relation? Is there any physical relation that happens and stays (not talking about sex here), like two people getting physically attached to each other through tentacles or something? Obviously not. The relation is only at the level of your mind.

We are currently looking for happiness in our thoughts (feelings and emotions included). We don’t actually form physical relations with anything. Money doesn’t get attached to our bodies; all the luxuries of the world just get attached to us at the level of mind.

If you buy a part of some land, then does it actually become yours? You just have it on some papers and you have it in your mind, but in reality, it’s not yours. I am not sure how many of you can see this through but the land is actually neither yours nor the governments’. It belongs to nature in reality.

So, this game is actually being played at the level of our minds and not anywhere else. There is no use of this nature if there is no one to observe its exquisite and ethereal beauty.

All one needs to do is believe that life is happening for him and not to him. The sunshine, the rainbow, the clouds, the moon, the stars, the trees, the rivers, the oceans, the flora and fauna, all of this is happening for you and you only, otherwise what’s the use of all this?

Time to Expand Your Thinking

But we don’t think this way. We have compacted and contracted our thinking to “I, ME, and myself”, and we keep on living in that tiny little bubble in this gigantic ocean, which is precisely what’s making us suffer for the rest of our lives.

It is this kind of thinking that is keeping us from living a happy life. “My carrier, my car, my health, my kids, my wife, my relationships, my house, my possessions, my money, my power, my status.”

We keep on relaying around these only, and then we die. We gotta start thinking BIG. It’s the need of the hour to expand ourselves mentally. We need to burst that bubble in order to harness the actual beauty of life and to see what we are really made and capable of.

Living a Happy Life is related to the Right Understanding

The way most people chase happiness is that they will form relations (at the level of mind), either with materialistic things or with people, and then if things go according to what they anticipated, they become happy for a minute or two, and the minute things go haywire, all hell breaks loose.

One moment we are all happy and singing, but the very next moment we want to leave everything and run away.

Is that relatable to you? Sure there is pleasure in this thought, wanting to have things go according to us. If you are in a business, then you are happy as long as things go according to plan, but the minute something goes wrong(which it ultimately will), you become all frustrated and furious.

Then slowly and steadily, a person gets bitter and bitter if things don’t go according to his plan for a long time. The more bitter he becomes, the farther he gets from living a happy life. He is just living for the heck of it but is actually dead from the inside.

This is one problem of trying to chase happiness through our thoughts.

Happiness and Fear are Mutually Exclusive

The other problem with becoming happy through our thoughts is that if we hold on to the thought that ‘I am happy because of so and so relationship(it can be anything) I have with this amazing person’, then you will live under the fear that what if the relationship comes to an end tomorrow.

One moment you will be happy because he is acting according to you, and the very next moment you will fight like anything. So happiness here is temporary. The very reason for your happiness can become the cause for your misery, later on. They are merely the two sides of the same coin.

Sure, we can ignore the fear, but let’s just face the reality; the happier you become with the person, the heavier will the pain be.

But hey! I am not trying to tell you to stop being happy about the amazing relationship you have and stay under this fear of getting separated. I know how hard you worked to get it going this far. I just hope you know what’s going on here.

Running in a Race Won’t Make You Happy

As long as you follow the world’s paradigm of living a happy life, which is to ‘achieve what you want‘, you will always be in a race, running from here and there, and will not be able to see what is there inside us.

What we do is that we form a concept in our mind, and then we want that thing to happen in order to be happy or to live a happy life. But we always overlook the major flaw here.

I mean just look at the people who undergo plastic surgery. The person incepts an idea in his mind that slim lips would look good on him (based on what society fed him), and he will become happy once he gets them.

What happens once he gets it done? He becomes ecstatic, looking at his new shiny lips. But wait, hang on! The very next day he went to a party, and what happens there?

He becomes the center point of every taunt and jibe. Even his friends ridicule him. So, what happens next? Another idea, another execution, temporary happiness, permanent restlessness, and loop keeps on running till eternity.

All it took was a single thought. The very thought of making his lips slim transformed his happiness into gloominess. The bliss he temporarily experienced, evaporated, the moment his friends pulled his leg instead of appreciating him.

Now he is stuck in the middle of nowhere. He can’t undo it and neither can he try something else because he is afraid that how society will judge him. If you are someone who is looking for happiness based on what society thinks about you, then you can’t possibly live a happy life.

Real Happiness lies in what You Think about Yourself

What is real beauty? To change things according to the whims of society or to completely accept the way you are? Of course the latter.

But we don’t think this way, because people around us and the companies around us are there to make us realize how ugly we look, how outdated we are, or how we are missing out on the latest fad in every field.

I will let you in on a little secret, HAPPINESS IS NOT GOOD FOR ECONOMY. We buy new clothes, new cars, new houses, change our mobiles every 5-6 months because we always wanna be at the top spectrum of the latest fashion, to look better than our neighbors and our friends and shine in society.

“We buy things we don’t need, with the money we don’t have to impress people we don’t know”

People are instilled with a sense of urgency and FOMO (fear of missing out) to get new products all the time, by a whole lot of distributed and intellectual marketing people, who know how to tap their insecurities and get under their skin.

Happiness is not good for business. Can u ever be happy going this way? Impossible! We are a generation of sad people trying to live a happy life on Instagram and Facebook.

More is Not Actually More

The whole world is trying to live a happy life in this way only, whether he is rich or poor, trying to gain happiness at the level of thoughts.

More money, more name, more fame, more cars, more houses, more jewelry, more of everything. Any materialistic possessions can only give you temporary satisfaction but they can never give you everlasting joy.

Whatever we do, some kind of desirable thought always stays afloat in our minds. These thoughts are always related to something or someone or even ourselves.

These things are constantly changing, the thoughts related to those things are also continuously evolving, the situations are changing, even the people are altering. You yourself are fluctuating. So, what do we do to tackle all this? ENTERTAINMENT!

We are all hungry for entertainment. The bigger the entertainment industry is, the more people are actually unhappy with their lives.

If you go to the hills or mountain regions, where people are really happy and peaceful with their lives, you will see that they don’t need entertainment there. Their lives are their biggest source of entertainment.

The more frustrated you are from the inside, the more tempted you become to draw your attention to temporary escapes in order to forget about your problems for some time. TV, mobile, Netflix, social media have become a very crucial part of our lives; something without which most people can’t even imagine living a day in their lives.

Happiness is when you are Free from Thoughts

Can getting dependent on something or getting addicted to something lead to a happy life? Or is becoming free of everything real happiness? Is there a way, where we can stay independent of any and every kind of thought to get happiness?

Because I guess now that’s the only question left to answer, since we have seen that we can’t get everlasting bliss solely at the level of thoughts. How can one live a happy life without any thoughts? Basically, this implies that we don’t need to connect happiness to some thoughts; a thought is required only to work.

You need food, clothes, a home, and all of your basic needs with money. So, this should be very clear that ‘thoughts’ are required to achieve just this. Happiness should be not confused with this.

Thought should only be used to become successful in the outside world which has its own importance. The moment you understand that you don’t need a thought to be happy, then something absolutely magical happens.

Now you can be truly happy, and no one can steal this happiness from you, because it is not dependent on any external source.

Now you can control your thoughts, instead of your thoughts controlling you.

All our lives, we are busy fulfilling our thoughts only, if you look closely. The thought of becoming successful, the thought of looking pretty, the thought of getting all the material possessions, and blah blah blah.

We are doing things we don’t wanna do because of the thought that doing it will make us successful, and not doing the things we want to do because we are afraid. Even this fear is also just a thought.

The moment you realize the fact that a single thought can objectively cause no harm to you, then you can be liberated from all the fears you have and start doing what you really wanna do.

How can you verify whether I am making sense or talking rubbish?

Only when you can see the reality as it is. And that’s only possible when you are stable enough to ask these real questions instead of stuffing in the latest gossips of film industries and celebrities or spending all day watching the news.

Thoughtless Mind is the Key to Happiness

Only when we see through the thought, the very limitation of the thought, can we actually be free from it. But if you are just faking to achieve that thoughtless state, then it is useless.

If you are truly understanding the fact that thoughts can’t make you happy and hence are wise enough to not use them to chase happiness; then that’s what I would call real intelligence.

And if you are getting rid of thoughts just because I said to go to a thoughtless state, without understanding the real depth of it, without relating anything to your personal life; then it is again all crap!

The “thought” is always related to something or someone. Thought can’t be without a relation. Can you think about the space between your eyes and your screen?

Can you think about anything which has no form? Once you understand this fundamental property of thoughts, then you can use it wisely. Then even if you get sorrow from the thoughts, you won’t actually be sad. Confused?

Sorrow VS Sad

See, they both are very different from each other. A world apart.

One is getting sorrow from the outer world. It can be anything, a business failure, a break-up, the passing away of someone close to you, and 112 other things.

We become sad and gloomy after receiving sorrow, which is what people generally experience. So, if we understand the mechanism of all this, then you won’t have to go through the second phase of experiencing sadness.

If your kid is ill or some other tragedy comes your way, sure you will cry and scream a lot, but you won’t be morose because of it.

Why be sad? It is coming out of the love you have for the person, so let it come out. Be happy, for at least your love is real for the person.

This is the real meaning of being in the present moment completely which is only possible through the right understanding. Now don’t go and cry out, “Why am I having thoughts?”. This is foolishness, if thoughts are coming, let them come.

Thoughts, whether they come or not, can’t directly do anything to you if you understand the fundamentals. Thoughts come inside you; you don’t come inside thoughts. (I am not sure if you can understand the gravity of this)

Expressing Happiness: A Way of Life

Once you grasp how to be really happy without doing anything, then after that whatever you will do, will be an expression of your happiness. The actions that are the expression of happiness are some next-level actions.

Now you won’t be a slave to anyone. If you can understand that your needs in the outer world are almost next to nil, then you can act freely and independently, without any pressure from anyone.

You won’t be a slave to money or success. You will do things because you are expressing your happiness through it. But what do we do instead? We keep on increasing our demands, which in turn requires more and more money, which needs more effort from our side.

Right now, most of us are working to chase money and success, and if we fail, we become miserable and gloomy. It should be the other way around.

Make it this way that the money and all the success chase you. And how is that possible? It happens from the kind of work you do to express your happiness instead of impressing your boss or a bunch of clients & customers.

Causeless Happiness is the need of the Hour

Right now, we are living a life, where we need a cause to be happy. It can be any cause; going out with friends, vacation, job promotion, your child’s birthday, and 112 other things.

We don’t know how to be happy without a cause. Can we even be happy without any cause? The answer is YES. This will bring a major change in your life. When you are causelessly happy, you will express that happiness with an open heart.

And when you are working as a way to express your happiness, then you essentially rise above the notions of success and failure. If you get success, well and good; if you don’t, you still keep on going with your head held high.

This is the way to become completely independent and free of everything and once you become independent and have the wisdom to use your thoughts intelligently, then that makes for a very deadly combination.

Then you can truly conquer yourself, achieve whatever you want, as much as you want, and at the same time, you will have the capacity to live without anything as well.

The Right Use of a Thought

Thoughts are required to survive in this competing world. Just for that. Once we understand this, then we will be at our full potential when working to make ourselves outstanding, and the rest of the time, leaving everything behind at the level of mind and just observing.

When we see someone without a thought, only then there can be real love.

Don’t think you are not stupid by sitting idle in a thoughtless state, if required you can very well use thoughts, but you are not because you have understood its real purpose.

To look at someone’s heart you don’t need a ‘thought’. You just have to see it as it is, leaving behind all your preconceived notions and beliefs—just like a newborn baby.

Real Happiness is not dependent on anything or anyone, it is only possible when we are able to accept everyone as they are.

Happiness is a decision. Happiness is a choice.

You can check out the other articles I wrote on Happiness: