It wouldn't come as no surprise to me that so many people first and foremost aim in life is to achieve happiness and for them it may seem that the sole purpose of life is to be happy. The concept of happiness runs wide, for me what makes me happy might not exactly also make you happy and vise versa.
Happiness alone isn’t enough.
There is more to life than happiness.
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
Feeling good most of the time might help us feel happier, but it doesn’t necessarily bring a sense of purpose to our lives. Feeling happy is an essential part of our lives but a life well lived has to be filled with accomplishments, purpose.
Recent research suggests that while happiness and a sense of meaning often overlap, they also diverge in important and surprising ways.
When it comes to thinking about how to be happier, many of us fantasize about taking more vacations or finding ways to avoid mundane tasks. We may dream about skipping housework and instead doing something fun and pleasurable. However, tasks which don’t make us happy can, over time, add up to a meaningful life. Even routine activities — talking on the phone, cooking, cleaning, housework, meditating, emailing, praying, waiting on others, and balancing finances — appeared to bring more meaning to people’s lives, but not happiness in the moment.
Meaningfulness, in contrast, seems to have more to do with giving, effort, and sacrifice.
Darius Foroux said that:
"happiness is just a by-product and the main purpose of life should be usefulness."
Lets look at it from this perspective, ok you get a well paying job, you go shopping and buy things you love most, you travel to foreign countries for vacation, you live a lavish life, you hang out with friends, Etc. These things should make you happy, right? But they are not useful. You’re not creating anything. You’re just consuming or doing something. And that’s great. Its actually interesting to live a comfortable life, I mean I love to go for shopping sometimes and travel for vacations but if am to be totally honest, it's not what gives meaning to life.
Have you ever asked yourself this question, what am I doing to make the world a better place? making things a little bit better that how i met it. Truth is you'll feel a sense on fulfillment if you do something great, it might not necessary be for yourself but for others, for your society.
Dr Anita, a surgeon at a specialist hospital in Texas says:
"I feel fulfilled whenever I help ease the pain of patients, I feel my life's purpose is to help others get well again, it's a huge joy for me to be of service to humanity, that's a responsibility am proud of and I'll honor it as long as I can."
When one is useful to others in a positive way, then that wholesome feeling of being useful definitely helps in achieving the enduring sense of fulfillment.
When one is truly fulfilled, one is truly happy.
Now the question is: what are you doing that's making a difference.
You don't have to take this too seriously, you can't change the world alone but you could make it a little bit better than how you met it, that's just your contribution to a better world.
Being useful could be anything that promotes a positive impact in one way or the other, it could be you helping the elderly, creating a products that has a useful impact, helping out people and providing for the less privileged no matter how little, writing a book, gardening, even being there for those who need you, building great stuffs, etc. These a just some few things that could make a difference, there are a whole thousand lots more positive things to do, you can make your own useful activity.
I recently ran into a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson and it quite helped me to understand more about a life of fulfilment.
Emerson says:
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
The interesting thing about being useful is that it cannot come into being by itself. We are useful when we are in relationship to honor someone else. In fact, I think of usefulness as the devotion of being in relationship.
We know ourselves in a deeper and truer way through serving, loving, and being present with others. We are not rocks, not islands—we are connection, kindness, and underneath it all joy.
Being useful is a mindset. And like with any mindset, it starts with a decision.
I hope You make that decision today, just do something that's useful. Anything.