What is the key to happiness? Humans have always been searching for the elusive path to happiness. Could it be like what great minds have been telling us, “we are the creators of our own happiness?”
Key to Happiness
A few days’ ago, I was browsing in a bookstore when I came across a book about TED presentation. I’ve heard that TED presentations share interesting ideas and decided to check out the TED website.
I discovered there are lots of thought-provoking presentations and I like to share some of them on this blog.
The Surprising Science of Happiness
I watched Dan Gibert’s TED presentation “The Surprising Science of Happiness” and was amazed to learn that we can synthesize happiness. Not only that, but synthetic happiness is of the same quality as natural happiness. Wow, this is thought-provoking.
There are two forms of happiness. We get “natural happiness” when we get what we want. Dan explains that there is another form of happiness which is known as “synthetic happiness”. We make “synthetic happiness” when we don’t get what we wanted. Yes, you read that correctly, “we can make our own happiness”.
Although we sometimes hear people who have overcome adversities and disappointments declared that what has happened to them is for the best (I do that at times too), other people (myself included) sometimes doubt if it’s all that true, or are we just lying to ourselves to make ourselves feel better. We doubt because we think that synthetic happiness is not the real thing. We feel that as synthetic happiness doesn’t come naturally but are created by us, it’s of an inferior quality.
Astonishing, Dan shows us that this thinking is flaw. Synthetic happiness is as real as natural happiness. Dan talks about an experiment that was being done on a group of patients with amnesia to prove this point. However, we need to be aware that synethetic happiness works best when we can’t do anything to change our situation. This is of utmost importance because not knowing it might cause us to choose an option which ultimately would cause ourselves to be deeply dissatisfied with the final situation that we are in. To find out more about the interesting experiment, check out Dan Gibert’s TED presentation “The Surprising Science of Happiness”.
The key to happiness is …
In a gist, freedom of choice is the friend of natural happiness but the enemy of synthetic happiness. And it’s true that some things are better than others. But we need to be aware of chasing one outcome at the expense of another outcome, no matter what. This is because, ultimately, we can manufacture the happiness which we so deeply desire.
