Your Happiness Is In Your Own Hands

It's common to search for happiness. However, when you become aware that being happy depends on you, you free yourself from the slavery of looking for it elsewhere.

Reviewed and approved by the psychologist Gema Sánchez Cuevas.

Written by Rafa Aragón

Last update: 21 December, 2022

Your incessant search to achieve happiness can lead you to become obsessed with obtaining it, even though you often don’t really know what it is or how to achieve it. Nevertheless, as a human being, you tend to think that happiness is what everyone wants. However, do you know to what extent being happy depends on you?

The definition of being happy

In order to know what happiness really is, you must answer the question of what it really means to you. As a matter of fact, the answer can be somewhat complex and is different for everyone. This indicates that happiness isn’t something that’s ‘out there’ but in yourself and how you live your life.

If you go through life with the belief that being happy depends on your circumstances, on the situations you go through, on having more money, well-behaved children, a good job, a stable partner, you’ll spend your life looking for what’s missing without realizing that happiness actually has nothing to do with any of this.

In fact, happiness is always to be found within you. It’s not something that’s outside of yourself. Furthermore, it doesn’t depend on what you have, but rather on what you are. This means learning to love, accept, and live with yourself. They’re the real keys to happiness.

Your attitude towards life changes when you become aware that personal satisfaction isn’t as variable as you’ve been led to believe. In other words, it’s not constantly dependent upon what happens around you. Indeed, you have the potential to choose how to live your life, achieve greater harmony, and take responsibility for your own happiness.

Happiness doesn’t mean having more positive experiences than negative ones. It means integrating all your experiences as vital learning, since they’re all useful and necessary.

How happiness is sold

It’s common to view happiness as dependent upon what happens around you. That’s probably what you’ve been taught throughout your life. However, this is why the tyranny of happiness exists.

Happiness is sold under certain formulas of how to live your life, how to behave, and what you should have. The media, advertising, and politics take advantage of this fact. Indeed, they tell you that the more things you have, the happier you’ll be. Furthermore, they put forward the idea that it’s necessary to constantly generate positive emotions and that you must live in an ideal bubble. However, this doesn’t represent reality at all.

That’s why you feel frustrated. Even worse, you disconnect with yourself. The incessant search for happiness in the external takes you further away from yourself and from the happiness inherent in your nature.

As a matter of fact, anyone who solely bases their happiness on what they have and what they achieve will end up losing themselves. That’s because these needs aren’t real. They’re ephemeral. In fact, they’re not genuine needs for satisfaction, they’re needs that they’ve created themselves.

The more you have, the more you need. Hence, as Saint Augustine claimed, “The richest man is not he who has the most but he who needs the least”. Therefore, dependence on the external means submitting to a continuous state of slavery.

Being happy depends on you

Assimilate and integrate. This is a fundamental message. You must understand that you’re not going to be any happier for achieving more triumphs, more money, power, and recognition. That’s because being happy has nothing to do with ambition. Nor will you be happier by obtaining greater sensations of pleasure, since the search for physical pleasure isn’t what causes happiness either.

These types of issues make up your superficial life, without depth and hardly any quality. They represent the human being who’s asleep and who lives in the world of quantity. Being happy depends on you. Therefore, it’s essential to realize that happiness is more psychological than physiological. It supposes a higher state of consciousness, a reunion with yourself, an awakening toward what’s truly important.

You can be happy if you learn to listen to yourself and attend to your true needs. However, you must move away from everything that enslaves you and places you in a permanent spiral of unsatisfied desire. Because being happy depends on you.