Happiness

[OliX]

What is happiness and what makes you happy?

[jonny.illuminati]

" I like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain.
I'm not much into health food, I am into champagne."

oh i already posted that once...

puppies

flowers

holidays with family

dirty girls

unexplored fetishes

bear skin rugs by fireplaces...

superior firepower...

the challenge of a numerically superior enemy...

[OliX]

That's more things that amuse you. Happiness is something totally different.
Things that we think that lead to happiness doesn't achieve that at all.
Try again.

[soma_stardust]

happiness mystifies me.
i'm not really sure what it is anymore.
nor can i pinpoint the things that make me happy.
i think... my little brother makes me happy. i'm glad he's alive. i'm happy seeing him and goofing around with him... but we share the same tragedy now, which also makes me sad. for a 10-year old to witness his mother having a stroke... and then she dies... he saw the stroke, i saw the passing into the next world...
so uh... it's sad but it's still happy?
see what i mean? happiness is so damned elusive.

[Ajax Knucklebones]

Happiness is a figment of the imagination. I believe in being content.

[TheDeathKnight]

Happiness is the freedom to do the things you enjoy doing.

Sometimes that takes time, sometimes it takes money.
But some forms of happiness require none of those things.

[VoltaireBlue]

I think diferent people equate happiness different ways.

[OliX]

TDK is closest to the point. Psychological factor plays a big role. Living standard and your own situation have less impact on it than you think. What a person does is way more important than surrounding.
Geografical position plays a big role too. People in democratic western societies are more happier than people in society with more collective politics.

Things like electronics, various gadgets and money or chilling in warm climate and doing nothing doesn't make us happy. Material happiness lasts short. We are actually made for activities. Doing stuff makes us happy. Creating something or just hiking makes us happy.

[athenahollow]

Things like electronics, various gadgets and money or chilling in warm climate and doing nothing doesn't make us happy..

But maybe doing stuff WITH electronics (such as playing games with your friends) is what makes you happy. So, electronics and stuff CAN equate happiness in the end.

[Raza]

Happiness is a positive emotional state that is intellectually thoroughly accepted and approved.

[a_small_death]

Happiness is in a pint of Guiness.

[Buster Friendly]

still warm abortions.

[OliX]

But maybe doing stuff WITH electronics (such as playing games with your friends) is what makes you happy. So, electronics and stuff CAN equate happiness in the end.

Ha! That's just an excuse for being lazy and making people think you're happy. :P
Recreation involves using of other muscles than just those on your thumbs.
Doesn't count. Try again!

[OliX]

Happiness is a positive emotional state that is intellectually thoroughly accepted and approved.

English please

No, just kidding. I understood it somehow but it is still common and wide accepted fact. I expected more of you on this matter than adding adjectives.

To understand happiness one must start from sorrow. It's the same thing but on the negative part of the scale. Sorrow is a biggest threat to our life quality. We should always try to talk about happiness and sorrow together because it's the same dimension. Funny is that when talking to corporations and consumers they mostly talk about happiness but artists and creators like more to talk about sorrow an how to prevent it.

Happiness is still most valued thing for me, and I bet it is for most of you as well and it should be discussed. There's no more important thing than spreading knowledge about it.

I still remember how happy I was in Bosnia for 10 years ago. I was way more poor than now but there was always money for beer and pack of smokes. And there was smile on my face more often than it's now. Some nations are more happy than others. Japan and Scandinavia is one of the worst on the list. Maybe you could count in Seattle too

[Raza]

English please

No, just kidding. I understood it somehow but it is still common and wide accepted fact. I expected more of you on this matter than adding adjectives.

My opinion is what distinguishes it from all the widely and commonly accepted facts that are nonetheless completely yet unsurprisingly false.

But really, you were no less than perfectly right to expect more. I fully intended to babble on for a few more paragraphs of mostly unnecessary adjectives, but noticed I was late for something and decided that the first sentence more or less stood on its own. Well spotted!

[OliX]

Widely and commonly accepted but false?
Here are some quotes:

Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence.
Robert Ingersoll

Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.
Margaret Lee Runbeck

Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing.
George Sheehan

But if you still mean widely accepted view on happiness by most, that is in material value, then I understand why you meant false. I hope you feel that is your duty to discuss this with friends in order to improve their happiness or at least to reduce their sorrow.

[Mindgames]

Happiness is unrepentant pleasure (Socrates)

It's also an entirely internal concept of what is 'good'. You can create happiness from nothing, but you can only create virtue from others. Nobody else can ever experience your happiness, only how it reacts with their own. Neither can they argue with it.

Personally, happiness is talking with someone willing to really think, warm socks and cold winter mornings.

[Raza]

No, I just meant to say that many things that are widely and commonly held to be facts are false, especially on such barely tangible subject matter as happiness.

Those quotes are all at least somewhat beside the point, too.

ETA:

Happiness is unrepentant pleasure (Socrates)

K, so Socrates pegged it. That's better.

[OliX]

Happiness is indeed a very individual and relative matter. We should elaborate more on this. I researched something and I think we can all agree that happiness doing (in my case making) and not having.

For me happiness is all those meetings with creative people and creating ideas or improving already existing ones. Or this date I have in a hour with this great and happy girl. More happiness. Now I need to get ready.

[Bacchus88]

Happiness is in a pint of Guiness.

Nectar of the gods

Back to happiness

To me at least it is where the heart and mind feel at most at neutral When, I am around good friends, listening to music I like and even my job set me into a place of euphoria. Being out there on the field, playing paintball with friends and with my own team its great...

Like right now I am listening to Covenant, VNV nation, Assemblage 23, pride and fall Neuroticfish - They're Coming to Take Me Away oddly enough, just puts me in a feel good mood...

[athenahollow]

Ha! That's just an excuse for being lazy and making people think you're happy. :P
Recreation involves using of other muscles than just those on your thumbs.
Doesn't count. Try again!

Now that's not fair. To say you have to be out physically doing something isn't fair at all. My friends and I are geeks. We get our greatest pleasure from sitting around playing video games and D&D, neither of which require any kind of physical movement, but all sorts of mental use.

[Mr Karl]

D&D makes me happy............................until I think about the fourth edition

[Raza]

D&D makes me happy............................until I think about the fourth edition

QFT

Like right now I am listening to Covenant, VNV nation, Assemblage 23, pride and fall Neuroticfish - They're Coming to Take Me Away oddly enough, just puts me in a feel good mood...

Well, it is a very cheery kind of insane.

Do you like Further, by VNV? It's one of my all time favority songs, despite the barely coherent pseudophilosobabble.

[OliX]

I was mostly kidding and mini-bullying you nice girl with awesome ass (hate to scroll up again).

You're right. It's possible for virtual world or whatever that we experience electronically to substitute for happiness. Were adapting. There you go, I actually widened my view on happiness thanks to you and got brand new idea about this happiness project I'm working on.

[Raza]

Happiness Project sounds rather scary, tbh. Good name for something ironic and dystopian.

[OliX]

Sounds scary? It's a project with some very creative and experienced people ranging from philosophers and psychologist over environmentalists and scientist to uniforms and suits. And it's all about improvement of individual life style. Kind of making a totally new educational system from scratch. Something that will increase happiness. Nothing wrong with that unless you like sorrow

[Raza]

So its some sort of omnibenign universal life enhancement, developed in easily propagated format by an assortment of presumed experts with respectable titles and positions capable of appealing to any major social demographic.

Not helping on the 'scary' bit, btw. xP

[OliX]

Haha, absolutely true actually. If you told me that stuff I wrote couple years ago I would totally run way.

Don't worry, it's not for us anyway.

[Mr Karl]

constant happiness is boring.................been there, done that..............it's the constant struggle to achieve happiness on every possible level of existence that makes living worthwhile.

[Morning Glory]

Happiness is an elusive, fleeting feeling of irrationality when you can shift your focus to ignore all other impulses and make everything fall into place. It's kind of like love. it's mostly bullshit, but there's still something to it that's true.

Most people aren't happy. that's a fact, and that's Ok. bad things happen, anyone who is always happy is a lunatic. And as mr. karl said, if it happens all the time it ceases to be special.

Sometimes I feel sad or angry. Most of the time I feel bored or anxious. The best I hope for is to feel content with what I've accomplished; that's good enough for me. And sometimes I'm happy. For brief moments I've even felt sublime, sometimes under the influence of drugs and usually what could be called temporary insanity.