You are NOT happy. You might pretend otherwise, but you are definitely NOT genuinely happy. Actually, just about no one is – and you are no exception.
You are NOT happy because you do not satisfy your genuine aggregate needs – financial, functional, emotional and spiritual – to the necessary extent. Worse, you have only a faint idea of what you really NEED – and this perception is (most likely) severely distorted. And you are not alone – just about everybody has this problem.
Instead of identifying and satisfying your genuine needs (the only true road to happiness), you are desperately trying to satisfy all of your whims, wants and desires (imposed on you by your environment, mass media, social networks, etc.). You think that happiness is all about satisfying your desires… and it is not.
This “rat race” is an exercise in futility, because, to begin with, your whims, wants and desires are unlimited – this is just the human nature. Hence, it is simply impossible to satisfy even a fraction of them.
And second, even if you do satisfy your whim, want or desire, it will NOT make you happy. Because genuine happiness comes only from satisfying your genuine needs – not whims, wants or desires.
But it gets worse – much worse, in fact. Because you live in an unhappy family (if you have one), reside in an unhappy community, work in an unhappy organization and you are a citizen (and thus a part of) an unhappy city (or village), an unhappy region, an unhappy state (or province) and of an unhappy country (nation). And – if you happen to be a European – of a deeply unhappy European Union.
Can you radically change this highly unhappy (and thus unacceptable) situation? Of course you can! Like everyone else, you severely underestimate your capabilities – you can achieve much more than you think even in the most daring dreams.
Yes, you CAN transform yourself into a genuinely happy individual; you CAN identify and satisfy all of your genuine aggregate needs; you CAN transform your family into a genuinely happy one – and ditto for your community, your organization, your city/village, you region, your state/province, your country/nation – and yes, even the whole European Union.
And you MUST do it. Because in reality, life is all about becoming and staying genuinely happy. There is no meaning of life other than that. And there is one very good news – you become genuinely happy the very moment you make a genuine commitment to happiness; develop a plan for making “all of the above” genuinely happy and start executing this plan right away.
Because ultimately genuine happiness is about the journey – not the destination.