Happiness is never identical, even for people united by culture and community. Because individuals face trials and tests that are uniquely theirs, their happiness rises up in a unique way. You happiness belongs to you and to you alone. If we think of happiness as something that we make within life, and not as something that we find elsewhere and then impacts into life, we can see that happiness refers to the person who proclaims it. So we have to be less concerned about definitions, about fitting happiness into precise categories and focus more on making it happen. Happiness can only be found within by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating your passion and your desires in the deep part of your soul. Sometimes, happiness comes in part from outside of yourself but only if you know where to look.
It’s really difficult to define happiness because pleasure of getting what you want is often fleeting. There is a big difference between pleasure and happiness. What gives you pleasure? Listening to music, movies, video games, sex, food? Whatever gives you pleasure comes from external sources. Money is an important external source.
When you buy new things, it gives you pleasure for some time. You may think a new cellphone, car or any big toy will make you happy but you will be disappointed because bring you pleasure for a week or two – pleasure but not happiness. Money can’t buy happiness, that’s true but it can buy pleasure and the new generation is always in the pursuit of pleasure, forgetting what is happiness. The problem is that the pursuit of pleasure works as a drug; you can become addicted to the external sources that bring you pleasant feelings. I think everybody has to learn this lesson someday.
“Things that bring you pleasure will make you addicted to them and won’t make you happy.” To become happy, you have to search for the solution inside yourself; you have to find unconditional love. What does it mean? Unconditional love is absolute acceptance of yourself and other people when you let them be what they are without changing or judging. So pleasures fill your emptiness for some time and make you addicted whereas unconditional love makes the emptiness go away and makes your life full of joy and meaning.
