Let’s face it you have a desperate need to feel happy, we all do…

 Before I speak further on that I am going to tell you a quick story. For 3 months I had been living on a desert island in a hut with nothing but a mattress, a fan, a mosquito net, and cold running water. I was as happy as a child.

I returned to the mainland had a hot shower and waves of bliss filled me.

Who knew hot running water was a luxury?

Anyway, back to happiness.

I think most people when it comes to happiness set themselves up to fail. There are too many items on their happiness checklist.

If you have struggled with a lack of content in your life for the things you think you should have had and didn’t I want to provide an alternative view. My view.

Normally here I would try and provide you with a promise. That by the time you finish reading this you will be saturated with happiness. Not this time.

What I am offering here is a perspective that has worked for a lifetime of happiness for me. For reference, it is a bad year for me if I have one day a year when my overall happiness drops below a 5 (out of 10).

Most people if you ask them what it takes to be happy, have if they are honest with themselves, a list.

They need the house, the car, the stuff, the money, the status, the holidays etc.

 

So when they don’t have those things their happiness diminishes. Because their picture of the way the world should be is out of kilter. Out-of-kilter makes us all lose happiness points.

So here is the idea I learned long ago. Remove the list. Set the bar low.

  • My one criterion for happiness. Simple… If I get to wake up in the morning “I am golden”. I get a new day, I get new opportunities, new choices, new chances. This makes me happy.

Just being alive is where I set my bar for happiness.

  • I don’t have to go down a checklist, I don’t have to have needs met, I don’t need, all the trappings that society says I need. I get one more day. One more day gives me the gift of life and that makes me happy.

Systematically lowering the bar.

  • I have said I am not sure that this will work for everyone. Maybe your bar needs to be higher than mine. Maybe you have additional requirements that need to be filled. There will be some though, if you examined them you could let go of. That rather than make you happy they bring you down because of their lack. Maybe today you let go of that need for just that one thing, and maybe just maybe your happiness may lift. Maybe if works you could keep culling them until you arrive at a bar so low your happiness is automatic.

 

🙂