Have you ever thought about what truly is happiness? I believe that at one point in time everyone would have come across this question. Everyone would like to be happier, including me. Happiness is important to me because it helps to protect my mental well-being. In this essay, I would like to explain my definition of happiness, which is a combination of good feelings and desire satisfaction, as well as setting goals as a way to achieve them.
Happiness, in my opinion, is a mixture of good feelings and satisfaction of all your desires, which is one of the major theories of happiness. It is not enough to just feel good, as it tends to be short-lived. In order to feel happy for longer, you have to experience and achieve something that you desire, which gives you a sense of achievement and therefore a sense of contentment. As Haybron (2013) describes in his book, having real-life experiences gives me a better sense of achievement, thus humans do not only want to experience things, but they want to do things. This is supported by the experience machine, where humans are unlikely to be plugged into it, even if they can pre-program their life experiences (Nozick, 1974), suggesting that in the virtual world desires are not satisfied as humans only have the experience but did not do it themselves. Thus, feeling good is the first step, but fulfilling your desires with your own actions is the next step to become happier.
The way to achieve happiness is by setting realistic goals for what we want to achieve. This ensures that we have desired end points to work towards, and when we accomplish them, it makes us happier. Of course, this will only make us happier if we feel good about ourselves. While working towards our goals and satisfying our desires, we should try not to be overly stressed over work. For example, Singapore, which ranks 34th among the happiest countries, and Singaporean workers are the most stressed in the world (Neo, 2019). When we are stressed, our level of happiness is lower than it could be. Therefore, we should stay in a good mood while achieving our goals so that, having achieved them, we will be happier.
In summary, this is my definition of happiness and the way to achieve it. All in all, an important part of happiness is to first feel good, so we should always stay positive and not feel too stressed.