Happiness Has a Million Definitions

Image source: HealthyPlace

The wonderful thing about happiness is that there is no formula to it. Whatever makes you happy completely depends on you and can come from literally anything. With social media nowadays, it can be really hard to not compare your life to someone else’s and use their perception of happiness as a standard you aspire to reach. This is what I did for a little while, but I realized that having a fake perception of happiness wasn’t fulfilling for me. Because of my realization, I was able to find ways to redefine happiness for myself and practice mindfulness in the meantime.

Sometimes, seeing people take luxurious vacations and whatnot can give me serious F.O.M.O. (fear of missing out). However, when I started viewing social media as just a fun place to see what people are up to instead of as a place to compare my life to someone else’s, I saw that I didn’t have to live through other people’s experiences all the time. I found joy in just driving 10 minutes to the grocery store while blasting music from my favorite playlist in the car. I took notice of small moments during the day where I felt good about completing things off of my to-do list, or feeling accomplished after doing an intense morning workout. In that process, I started to be more mindful of my actions and lived life minute by minute.

Being mindful reminds you that time is fleeting and that moments, regardless of whether you enjoy or waste them, will go and you can never get them back. With a finite amount of time that we all have, I think that enjoying every piece and sliver of time is much more worth it. With this positive mindset, you’ll always feel more eager to get out of bed every day to find something new to make happiness out of. 

So, you don’t necessarily have to find happiness; you can create it. By being imaginative and feeling joy in being around other people, exploring something new, or in just about anything, you’ll find that there are a million different definitions for happiness.