Existential Psychology

Happiness Now

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The only way to insure your happiness is to realize that you have all the conditions necessary for it right now in this moment, and the only thing stopping you from attaining it is you. We tend to take the things we already have for granted until they are taken from us, things like our health, our important relationships, and our youth. We don’t appreciate the miracle of our existence as it is because we focus most of our attention on working towards some future goal, believing that when external conditions finally come together we will get what we’ve always wanted and happiness will ensue.

But there is a huge flaw in putting your happiness on hold. You are only capable of projecting yourself forward as you are now, not as you will be when that time comes to pass. By the time you get what you think you’ve always needed to make you happy it might turn out that your outlook has changed or that the reality of the situation is not how you imagined it, leaving you in the exact same spot as you have always been.

The problem with banking on future happiness is that the process of moving towards some goal almost invariably changes you. What you are so sure will make you happy now can only make you happy right now, not necessarily in the distant future when you have actually achieved your end.

At an existential level if your mentality is chasing happiness instead of inhabiting happiness, the state remains ephemeral. It will probably stay one step ahead of you your whole life, evading your grasp. The mindful solution is to cultivate happiness in every step of your life journey, to embrace it right now based on your current conditions instead of considering it a goal to reach that can only come about if your conditions change.