What is happiness? A simple question with complicated and confusing answers. One of my colleagues asked me this evening. It took a few minutes before I answered, "it is... something that set you free?" It was absolutely not a good answer!
He and two other colleagues were discussing the difference between love and fall in love. My colleague said that love brings happiness and fall in love brings joyful. I do agree with his idea. When you fall in love, you are like riding a roller coaster, up and down, full of fun and your adrenaline is pumped. Exciting. But when you are in love, you feel like you are in the prairie with the blue sky and the songs of the birds, peaceful and... you feel free.
Happiness comes from the fulfillment of our needs, not our desires or wants. The problem is that many people are trapped in the last one. We think that what we want is always what we need. And what is the difference between needs and wants? It is also not an easy question to be answered. Frankly, I don't have enough competency to define them. But since I'm writing this on my personal blog, I can say whatever I want (or I need?? hehe..)
Needs are natural. I could say that everybody on this earth have the similar needs as Abraham Maslow showed them on the hierarchy of needs. Freud called it id. We need to eat, to love, to be loved, to be appreciated, etc. They come from inside.
And what about wants? Wants are more socially constructed. When someone says that she is hungry, she needs to eat (yes, we can say she wants to eat, but still, she needs to wipe her hunger). If she is Javanese, her parents maybe tell her to eat rice (Freudian defined it as ego for her want to eat rice, and super ego because she doesn't prefer to eat the stolen rice, bread, or even shoes, hehe..) And when she needs someone to be her partner, her society maybe tell her to find a good looking, mature and prosper man (super ego has controlled her to create an ideal partner and mostly, heterosexual, therefore she has to reduce her same sex sexual desire if she feels it). So,
it seems that the wants are actually the way to fulfill the needs.
Back to our topic that many people trapped in their wants instead of focus on their needs. We try to fulfill our wants with the aim to reach the happiness. And what happen then? We may feel joy, fun, and define it as a happiness. I can't say that it is wrong. The definition of the happiness itself may vary from one person to another. But in my opinion, that kind of 'happiness' will not be long-lasting, so I will call it 'the pseudo of the happiness' or in another word, it is an ecstasy. We have only fulfilled our wants, not our needs. Once you don't want it anymore, you will loose all of the feeling. Some parts inside you are still empty and need to be completed.
Ya, sometimes it's hard to find what do we really need since we belong to a society. What I can suggest is we maybe need to do a little reflection: "What do we feel after we have reached what we think we need? Do we feel like in the peaceful prairie? Or we feel like we are riding a roller coaster?"
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