How to Lead a Happy Life ?
-Vishwas Gupta
What if I can tell you that all the commodities you need to lead a happy life can be bought through money. All you need to lead a happy life is to impress people by creating fake status quo for yourself. Wearing Branded Clothes & Nice Shoes, Owning a phenomenal watch, racking up enough bucks to buy a luxury car, having an extraordinarily good looking partner, using latest gadgets are all the activities that would lead to ultimate sense of euphoria. In a nutshell, basically being rich would enable you to lead a super ecstatic life and fulfil the purpose of life. At this moment, you would be thinking all the above-mentioned traits would make you super-ecstatic and let you lead an awesome life. Unfortunately my friends, all these assumptions are completely delusional. If you believe in 'em , you are hooked up with a superficial belief. The materialism that today’s society propagates has been absorbed by your immature mind. There is a need for you to self-introspect and ask yourself some basic questions.
Lets imagine a scenario, you are filthy rich, everyone wants to hang around with you, all the commodities you have are bang-on luxurious , your clothes are extremely dapper. You live a life to attract people’s attention and in fact they are just crazy about your social media updates. Everything seems to be so perfect, you have blind followers and a luxurious lifestyle.
But do spare 15 minutes of your life to think about what I am going to highlight and sum up in a couple of paragraphs. Maybe it is possible my thoughts about life would provoke your conscience and would burst the bubble of materialism deep rooted in your subliminal mind but I won’t deny the possibility of you stating me as a fool or even a maniac and ignore my words.
We live in a superlatively materialistic world. Almost everything has been commercialised. Multi-National Companies are trying to create a facade regarding what a happy and successful life is. Almost all movies create a periscope of happiness is being filthy rich and bad-ass. Not only have these movies wrongly affected teenagers’ perception about the purpose of life but also harmed their overall cognitive development. One should note that not all the movies promote materialism and false capitalism but most of them do. The crux of the situation is that materialism is deep rooted in the society and now lets focus on the numerous ways in which it affects our life on a daily basis.
We have an urge to buy commodities from the most popular brands. We berate certain alternatives of a particular commodity not on the terms of quality but on the terms of its brand. The status quo a particular smartphone or a car would provide us is a major priority while buying it. We are being driven by society; we don’t listen to our hearts anymore.We don’t enjoy the food we are having as much as we enjoy the accumulation of likes on its photo that we uploaded on let’s say Instagram. We would wear uncomfortable shoes or heels as not wearing them would make us look alienated from the society. We would want to run around in search for a partner about whom we can boast, the partner we are looking for may or may not have the essential ethics and morals but they should have picturesque looks and a spectacular beauty. We would upload pictures of ourselves and our dear ones not to share our happiness associated with the pictures but to rack up likes and analyse other’s judgement of ours based on our looks. We would use swear words, do unethical thing to look cool among our pears. “The value of Inner Beauty is diminishing”- A simple fact that would sum up the importance of my statement is that If we would have valued inner beauty, then libraries won’t have been drastically empty in comparison to gyms. There are way more utterly materialistic activities we are involved with on a daily basis but I would have to restrict the examples so as to keep the length of this write-up
anti-boring.
But do spare 15 minutes of your life to think about what I am going to highlight and sum up in a couple of paragraphs. Maybe it is possible my thoughts about life would provoke your conscience and would burst the bubble of materialism deep rooted in your subliminal mind but I won’t deny the possibility of you stating me as a fool or even a maniac and ignore my words.
We live in a superlatively materialistic world. Almost everything has been commercialised. Multi-National Companies are trying to create a facade regarding what a happy and successful life is. Almost all movies create a periscope of happiness is being filthy rich and bad-ass. Not only have these movies wrongly affected teenagers’ perception about the purpose of life but also harmed their overall cognitive development. One should note that not all the movies promote materialism and false capitalism but most of them do. The crux of the situation is that materialism is deep rooted in the society and now lets focus on the numerous ways in which it affects our life on a daily basis.
We have an urge to buy commodities from the most popular brands. We berate certain alternatives of a particular commodity not on the terms of quality but on the terms of its brand. The status quo a particular smartphone or a car would provide us is a major priority while buying it. We are being driven by society; we don’t listen to our hearts anymore.We don’t enjoy the food we are having as much as we enjoy the accumulation of likes on its photo that we uploaded on let’s say Instagram. We would wear uncomfortable shoes or heels as not wearing them would make us look alienated from the society. We would want to run around in search for a partner about whom we can boast, the partner we are looking for may or may not have the essential ethics and morals but they should have picturesque looks and a spectacular beauty. We would upload pictures of ourselves and our dear ones not to share our happiness associated with the pictures but to rack up likes and analyse other’s judgement of ours based on our looks. We would use swear words, do unethical thing to look cool among our pears. “The value of Inner Beauty is diminishing”- A simple fact that would sum up the importance of my statement is that If we would have valued inner beauty, then libraries won’t have been drastically empty in comparison to gyms. There are way more utterly materialistic activities we are involved with on a daily basis but I would have to restrict the examples so as to keep the length of this write-up
anti-boring.
If you are messed up with all these loopholes of materialism, then my dear friend you need to assess the direction in which your life is going. Don’t get me wrong, I am not at all stating to abandon wearing expensive clothes, footwears or any other accessories but just think about it the next time you buy any commodity. Do you really like the clothes you are wearing? Do you relate to the stuffs you are buying? Are you influenced by the people surrounding you to make your decisions? Do the people who influence your decisions criticise you when you are wrong? Do the people who help racking up likes on your social media accounts show you the mirror of reality? Did your good looking partner do anything to improve you as a person? Did he/she submerge their soul with yours and made your ambitions and goals theirs? Did he/she made your life his/her own?
Now let me give ideal answers to the questions I just raised. Dear readers, the answer to my query is life is damn simple it is the materialism deep rooted in our minds that makes it complex.
Don’t ever let people judge you on your looks because what makes you an unique identity is your conscience and your heart. Absorb the positives and ignore the negatives. Don’t let the materialism of world influence your day to day decisions. Don’t let people who don’t even know your soul tell you how you should appear and what you should drink eat or wear. Do what you like , Do what you feel makes you happy , it may be dancing , singing , playing a particular sport , spending time with your loved ones ET all. Life is not about having enormous amount of resources, life is about making it enormous with the limited resources you have. Once you carve out a genuinely enormous life in terms of your bonds with your family, friends and kin, life would certainly be euphoric. Happiness not necessarily depends on what you have, it depends on what all you can give to your dear ones.
Apart from these advises what plays a major role in your life being successful is having an amiable and alluring life partner. Now don’t get confused by the adjectives I used to describe your potential life partner. All those adjectives meant were that your life partner should have explored your soul and you should have explored theirs. This is not a process that could be performed manually. It just happens, you tend to just fall for the person and it is not because of how they look and what they do, it is because of the person they are, the ethics and morals that constitutes them. Once you have found that right person then he or she simply becomes your other half and you two strive hard in life to rectify each other as a person. It doesn’t imply rectifying what constitutes you as a person. It means rectifying your shortcomings as a person, for e.g., eliminating your urge to procrastinate tasks. Every aspect in your and his/her life unifies. This is a magical experience which not many people are getting to experience because of chasing materialism.
I have nearly told you all the ingredients of a simple yet happy life. However, there is another advice I would like you to consider. Next time you feel influenced by people’s opinions on your physical appearance, ignore them. You are what you are and nobody’s irrelevant view can make you irrelevant for the ones who really care about you. Delete your digital life to a large extent. Interact with people who love you, discuss about ideas instead of commodities and people. Learn as much as you can, invest in knowledge instead of non-living objects. Lead a simple, knowledge-oriented, carefree life but yeah do care about your other half, family and kin. Do care about your health and just work hard and achieve your dreams. Stop chasing materialism and seek positive vibes which are all around us.
In the end, I would like to say that I was entrapped with materialism too, I may be influenced a little bit by it but I have matured a lot, improved a lot. I am on my way towards being a perfectly happy guy who knows the purpose of life. I have learned from experiences and you would learn too. Hope you guys get to know, how it feels like when you are beyond materialism, how simple and fun life is. Kudos for those who are beyond materialism and know the immense happiness and positive vibes persistent in life and for those who feel entrapped in materialism, It’s never too difficult and It’s never too late.
I hope, I influenced your life in a positive way and if unfortunately I contradicted your opinions then I sincerely apologise for it.
Thank You for lending your precious time to read my opinion towards life.