For the past few five years, you have dedicated your whole time, pursuing a cause, maybe a career, business or anything to give your life a good meaning and in the process, you have won hundreds of battles, lose thousand more and the journey is still long with many stops and sadly, accidents, fatal ones.
But you have made up your mind that you must get there, even when the signs are not very clear. For most of the people, given the fragility of where we came, the beginning is always hard and takes both bravery and great efforts to push forward. Unfortunately, not everyone makes it because for some reason or another, each one of us has their unique journey and life is 100 percent their choices, efforts and even luck. It is only the strong that win, the weak remain, stranded on this voyage if they can’t push hard.
Humankind has evolved over the last 50 years. We have built better machines to make life easier; electronics, ballistics and nuclear missiles, better healthcare and now, people have more chances of survival than they were 100 years ago. The goal was just simple, to make people happier but in what way, that is what you are yet to figure out. But more than ever, most people are sick from chronic disease, cancer, blood pressure, liver problems, name it all for eating too much food than those who have nothing or little to eat.
The biggest discovery of the 21st is the social media and the good news is that it has brought the world closer together and has given everyone the rare privilege of leaving their digital foot-prints and it doesn’t matter if you are smart or dull, social media has given everyone a voice and all they need just is internet connection.
But the bad news is that this social media proves you wrong a thousand times daily because most social media algorithms are built to keep us scrolling endlessly and in the process, show us how bad we are in so many ways because there would be someone on the other side who does better than you. Do not pay attention to social media if you want to be partially happy. It is all lies, to make you feel like you are not doing anything meaningful with your life and as we all know, everyone has a goal, something they want to achieve but you don’t need to explain everything. It is your journey and it is you alone who know where it started and where it is taking you. The sad part of it is that you will never be truly happy if you continue to force things that aren’t working, relationships, connections or even a career.
In the past few years, Amazon, in its goal to make people find happiness and fulfillment, has been able to make it easy for over 8 billions people on earth to have access to self help books and over 500, 000 of these books are about happiness. YouTube on the other hand, has thousands of videos on “how to be happy” but with all these resources, the global happiness index has never been better with some first world countries reaching their lowest rank in the report.
The Global Happiness report, like Gross Domestic Product per capita, assesses people’ well-being, opportunities, corruption, governance, relationships and generally the economy of the country to determine if the people of that particular country are happy or hurting in their search for happiness.
It is such a wonder that a human being can identify if another is happy, when they are themselves struggling with something behind closed doors. Maybe divorce papers waiting to be signed or a million dollar mortgage to be paid. The truth is every human being has a problem they are dealing with. It could be anything to do with finances or a relationship gone wrong. The world never runs short of problems. Even the people we imagine to be happy are absolutely not.
I have never come across anyone who doesn’t want to be happy. It is common for all of us. But no matter how much we have in resources and opportunities, it seems not to be enough for most people. Human desire has frustrated all of us for years and also happens to be the leading causes of unhappiness in our world.
The Global Happiness Report, 2025, was released in March, with Finland on top of the list but the United States, one of the world ‘s largest economies and home to over 800 tech billionaires and thousands of celebrities, was not on the top tenth. Inside our minds, something is always complaining that this is not enough. The pursuit of happiness is one of the US’s unalienable rights, that every American must dream and pursue happiness. Unfortunately, this hasn’t helped in creating a world real life stubbornly refuses to deliver.
Around the tenth century, Rahman III, Caliph of Córdoba, made it a business that he would live his life as a happy man and by this, he meant, he would have as many women as he wants and enjoy every bit of his royal life, nice meals and security around his palace. He was by virtue, one of the most powerful men of his time, who enjoyed military and cultural achievements, as well as the earthly pleasures of his two harems but towards the end of his life, he decided to count the exact number of days during which he had felt happy. They amounted to only fourteen days. This means that out of 70 years of his life, it was only two weeks that meant the world to him, the rest, did not matter. How sad!
Like the Rahman, our collective goal as humans is to be happy and enjoy life but we often forget that happiness is not a destination. It is just in the process, in your current marriage, job, and relationship, in college and finally, it is a mindset. Do not wait for tomorrow to smile because there are high chances that it may never come. Peace.