I have had a break but am happy to be back in my office.
Happy that I have a job to come back to – a job that I love and find satisfying and energising.
Happy: In these troubled and uncertain times that might seem a little unusual.
While I was away I spent some time reading about happiness and I will admit that, paradoxically, that made for some fairly depressing reading.
Terms like employment disengagement, decision fatigue, loss of purpose, discontent, outrage and meaning, a growing sense of loneliness and a sense of helplessness are the news currency of our days and many writers seem to believe we, as a people, are incapable of finding peace and happiness in our current existence.
And then a crisis like the pandemic just makes it worse.
If you didn’t get COVID-19 and you didn’t lose your job because of it, the worst part for most Australians has been the hugely increased cognitive load resulting from it. On the surface it’s been a time of diminished choice. You couldn’t leave your house. You couldn’t find toilet paper. You couldn’t sit in the park. But you still had to figure out what you would do, and that required conscious thought….Every tiny decision we make these days, from catching a bus to ringing a doorbell to how far to stand apart in the coffee queue now comes with the potential to bring death to you, your loved ones, or those in our community with compromised health….For every rule change, for every relaxation – or potential reimposition – of restrictions, we are forced to make a new set of decisions. It will be some time before life is back to normal – if ever. Jessica Irvine, Senior Economics Reporter SMH.
At least we in Australia are free.
Shouldn’t that make us happy?
Maybe….
For most of the Ancients, freedom was freedom from our natural desires and material needs. It rested on a mastery of these deep, natural urges in favor of self-control, restraint, and education into virtue. It placed the community — the polis — ahead of the individual, and indeed could not conceive of the individual apart from the community into which he or she was born. They’d look at our freedom and see licentiousness, chaos, and slavery to desire. They’d predict misery not happiness to be the result.
Given our relative wealth and safety in Australia, shouldn’t we be one of the happiest people in the world? Or are we hardwired to be unhappy?
Discontent is human. People will always find something that needs improving or an issue that bothers them. Once your lower-order needs are fulfilled, you move on to higher-order needs. We don’t stop looking for problems to solve as things get better, we just shift our focus to new problems. That’s why people living stable lives in developed nations aren’t necessarily “happy.”
Below I will offer up a few of the more interesting snippets of writing about happiness. Maybe you will agree with them, maybe you will find them depressing or oversimplified but I think they deserve consideration as we emerge from our recent and current trials.
They might even help us to overcome the pall of fear and negativity that seems to be our daily currency and allow us to take the opportunity to be happy, or at least, thankful for our lot in life.
Despite the current problems facing the USA, we can start with a (past) presidential comment:
Happiness is fleeting; only fulfillment through purposeful achievement is sustainable.
Five essential elements to experiencing long-lasting happiness:
Reading these writers, the message seems to be that the keys to achieving a level of happiness, contentment or peace appear to be:
It appears we still have a long, long way to go ……………….
Mr Terry Muldoon Principal, St Columba Anglican School |
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