Disclaimer: To be clear, abuse of drugs, alcohol, getting off at porn is not the “happiness” I am referring to and I would never encourage anyone to do those things to be happy. That is destructive and damaging to your health and relationships and not the form of happiness if I referring to.
To be happy is not wrong. To be with people you love or to achieve a goal you’ve worked so hard for and finally get it, happiness is surely to happen. As it should, Yahweh gave humanity the ability to experience emotion. However, I caution people to avoid the ideology to do what makes you “happy”.
Instead of doing what makes you happy all the time, I would suggest living your truth and let that truth define your zeal in a healthy, consistent way. Happiness is an emotion, just like sadness, fear, anger, confusion and anxiety. If you can choose “happiness” so easily and it supposedly is what will keep you in a state of bliss and solve your problems when they arise, why is that “happiness” so quick to leave when life doesn’t favor you or you experience a hardship that devastates you?
The concept of doing what makes you happy isn’t wrong, but it is temporary because sadly we live in a fallen world where that emotion is constantly attacked, tested and in some cases, there are individuals that strive to steal another person’s happiness. To do what makes you happy, may be subject to attack and to theft, so what then?
If being parents makes a person happy, but their child dies, where does their happiness go?
If being a nurse makes a person happy, but their patient dies, where does their happiness go?
If being a teacher makes a person happy, but their student comes into class with a gun and shoots several students and the teacher lives through that, where does their happiness go?
Sure, you recover over time and move on, but do you see what I’m saying? If we put so much value behind the idea of doing what makes us happy, then we almost become if not completely helpless when the very thing that makes us happy is attacked or stolen from us.
So how can do what makes them happy if “happiness” will fail and abandon someone every time the moment trauma and misfortune manifests?
It is an instant thing, you cannot stop happiness from coming to you no more than you can stop it from leaving you, but what you can stop is the cycle of needing to feel that emotion or to depend upon that emotion to provide validation for what you do. And yet people will spend years of their life chasing after an emotion that can never be fully loyal to you or remain with you consistently the way truth can, for truth does not depend on the drive of emotion in any circumstance—good or bad.
Truth, is just that. The truth. It is not a lie, it is not able to lie or has any record of being wrong. It is virtually and literally impossible to destroy it. Granted some will twist what the truth means or what it represents, but the origin of truth cannot be destroyed. Therefore, rather I encourage people to consider the notion to seek truth over outlets to bring you “happiness” or develop bad habits to have or feel “happiness.
Seek out the truth in what you do instead and then live out that truth and let the truth be what you turn to for comfort, let truth remind you why you do what you do and let truth be the validation for what you do. No matter what, just remember that truth will always be there and provide reassurance when happiness leaves or is wrongly stolen from you.
Copyright © 2022 Artzenin Eklektós
Blog post written by Artzenin Eklektós
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