The Key to Happiness.

Happy New Year!

Well, Happy Chinese New Year to be exact.

I was supposed to blog at least once a month, but I forgot last month. My bad.

Also I didn't really have anything to write about.

Honestly I think I write better than I speak English. My verbal English is bad, I think.

Probably from lack of usage. Must try to speak more.

Maybe speak to myself more. Like I do in this blog. Ahaha ha.

7 lines in, and I've already run out of things to say. Hmm.

Safe to say that I won't be a professional blogger in the near future....

But then again, all these professional bloggers do is post pictures of themselves (because most of them are very pretty), with very minimal writing done, and voila!

Tells you what the real world is like.

I saw this video very recently. It's a talk by Cameron Russell, an underwear model, and she talks about what her life as a model is like. It's a 10-minute video, you can watch it if you want.

If you don't, basically she's saying, looks aren't everything, don't judge a book by its cover. And pretty people are also very insecure of their looks.


I've been watching loads of these videos lately. They've been an eye-opener of sorts.

No, not because I've been watching videos of underwear models, (just this one, I swear), because some of these videos make you think on what you think you already know.

There was another video which struck me as very interesting. AND there was no underwear model involved.

It was a video by a psychologist that talks about happiness. Why are we happy? Why are we unhappy?

It's a slightly longer video, 22 minutes long to be exact, but its worth the watch. I'll post it at the end of the post.

The gist of the video is that happiness is not determined by what you get / have, it is determined by the way you look at it.

I'm 25 years old this year, and I think I'm entering the soul-searching phase of my life, so all these questions come to mind.

Why am I here? What am I supposed to do? Why am I unhappy? Why am I happy? Should I be content?

There was one point in time where I was upset with myself for not being happy. I kept asking myself, "You have everything, so why are you not happy?"

It took me awhile, and a whole lot of thinking and doing, basically changing the course of my life, but I think I've found the answer.

The key to happiness is to be happy with what you have.

This is the key.

If you can do this, you shall be happy for the rest of your life.

This is of course not to say that you will never be sad. Of course there are things in life that may upset you, but as French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard once said of anger, "It will cross the mind like a bird crossing the sky without any tracks".

This also does not mean that you should be passive and not strive for anything more than what you already have. You should, and by all means you must, because for every second you live, you are that much closer to death.

This is to say that if you try but you don't succeed, it sucks, but don't beat yourself up about it. No point in being sad about something you can't control.

Of course, its easier said than done. But I believe it works.

Sometimes, in our pursuit of happiness, we do things that we might regret later on. We so desperately need to feel happy, we do things like take that higher paying but stressful job, or buy that house we can barely afford, or date that ridiculously beautiful but awfully shallow girl.

I have a friend that appears to not know what he really wants. His first job was a high-paying one, but it was in another country, so he felt alone and lonely.

So he decides to leave the job, get a job in Malaysia with a lower pay, but at least he's near to his friends and loved ones. Finally gets married, but now says he cannot work a desk job, he has to do something more hands-on.

So what does he do? He decided to get another job, similar to his first job, and in that same country.

I don't know about you, but looks to me like he's back to square one. Make that square negative 1, because before it was just bachelor him missing friends and family, now its married him, far away from the wife.

When he asked our group of friends, myself included, whether he should go for that job he was offered, me being myself, I told him that he instead should focus on his family. Bad enough that they were living in different states at the time, now he plans to move out of the country and go offshore for weeks.

But he says to me that he HAS to try, he cannot live not knowing what it would've been like, what it could've been like.

So I told him to go for it.

As a friend, we wish, we hope that we could dissuade our friends from doing things that are bad for them, but if they are adamant, the only thing we can do is support them and hope for the best.

The key to happiness is to be happy with what you have.

This is actually considered mengumpat, but I suppose its for good.

If you wish to stumble upon happiness, I think you should at least know what you want, else you'll end up with a lot that you don't.

Enough for now.

Peace.