July 02, 2015

Unhappiness = Happiness??!!


“ What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“ I want to be happy”.
“No, No ..you don’t understand the assignment”
“No, No..you don’t understand life”
     -Lennon


Of late, the primary sources of my thoughts and knowledge  are whatsapp, twitter and Facebook :P. Its probably a testimony to how intelligent I was before, that people don’t seem to notice the current fall in standards of my thinking :P..hehe.
Anyways, this was one forward a friend forwarded and I was so absolutely amazed at the profoundness and stuck by the simplicity of the thoughts expressed that it made me think of a ridiculously complex theory about happiness :P

I have decided to call it the Unhappiness Threshold theory …According to my new theory, I have concluded that  it is extremely essential for a person to be sufficiently unhappy for him to even try  to reach a point of happiness… Huh?..U say..Lemme explain..
I suppose, we can agree that every single minuscule thing we do right from the time we are born is all aimed at realizing an objective which will make us happy. This happens even before we know we are doing something and definitely before we know what happiness is. Given the wholehearted 24 * 7 effort we put into being happy, seems to me, we should all have been more..eh ..happy.
Now, there are at least a zillion reasons why people are not as happy as they want to be.. Many of them are not resolvable…like loss of a loved one, loss of health etc etc ..Since, there is precious little that can be done about these, we will leave these out of consideration for this theory…

However, fortunately, most of us are not hounded by any of these earth shattering problems. At the most, we only have teeny tiny niggles, worries and concerns that  we constantly worry and fuss about. Infact, these are so tiny that we usually don’t do anything about them..
Consider some instances,

A person who is slightly overweight never does anything consciously to reduce weight.. He/She is more likely to passively worry about it than actively try and to do something to cast the problem away.
Or a person who is bored of his job. I see people like that all the time. And mind you, I am not taking about financial considerations here. The fix needed could be something as simple as getting a project change. They are a lil unhappy about their jobs but they shrug it off and get the work done and only crib about it from time to time.
But this passive worry does have a cost to it.. It stops the person from achieving that ideal blissful happy state. And this behavior, on the face of it ,is against our natural instinct. So, what is causing this deviation?
 This is where my theory comes in. I think the reason we don’t act on these worries is because the unhappiness they cause is too insignificant compared to the perception of the effort we think is required in order to move to a better state. So, till the unhappiness levels cross a threshold ( which could be different for different people and for  different situations), the action required to move to the happiness state is not performed.
So, next time , you think you are not happy enough, check and see if you are unhappy enough!