I recently read about a guy who is doing charity work in Cambodia and his view is that most of us are “addicted to comfort.” He was rich (in a money sense) but only really found happiness when he gave up all the comforts and “must have” material goods, and went and helped people.

I’m looking forward to doing the same sometime in the future.

My idea of happiness is one of inner peace and contentment. Happiness for me is a function of one’s health, education, basic material comfort and very importantly loving and accepting yourself for who you are.

However, I also believe that one’s happiness is also a function of one’s contribution to trying to maximize the welfare of the less fortunate members of society. The latter means contributing to the material and spiritual comfort of others, contributing to the struggle for clean air and water, safe foods, health care and education and inevitably participating in the fight of humanity’s survival against the fossil fuel based climate change.

For me happiness is therefore functionally related to a wide array of variables that generate comfort and safety not only of one’s family and oneself but also the happiness and safety of the other members of society. My happiness function excludes selfishness as a varible though it includes my self-interest and as a variable.

Thus for me happiness is highly subjective and relative and is not measurable solely or mainly in material wealth. How many wealthy people are miserable, sad and depressed? How many millions of people in wealthy nations are stressed out, sad, lonely and profoundly depressed?

As such we should seriously evaluate the merits and demerits of the socalled Gross National Happiness index or GNH versus the merits and demerits of the already discredited Gross National Product or GNP that is used primarily to measure current production of goods and services or material wealth.

So in the mean time as we grapple with the meaning of happiness, we should probably heed the words of Bob Marley and “Speak happiness because we sad enough without your woes”.

We should also heed Marley’s words and remember than “…a hungry man is an angry man”. I’ll challenge you and I to munch of the following questions: Is a hungry man a happy man? or Can a hungry man be a happy man? More importantly, why are there hungry men, children and women in our world some of whom are obese? and Why are there obese billionaires and multimillionaires who are frequently subsidized by the cheap labor and taxes of the millions of hungry and poor peoples on our planet?

Peace makes me HAPPY and war makes me SAD!

Respectfully,

Michael Heslop

I’m still thinking about what happiness really is.

One theory goes that it is the ability to laugh at yourself, no matter how bad the situation. (The reason that Australians are regarded as amongst the happiest people in the world is that they don’t take anything – or anyone – seriously.)

Another goes that happiness is the absence of sadness. The northern Europeans mentioned above are not known for outright beaming laughing-type happiness, rather, it is more a quiet inner contentment with life.

Enough of the generalisations and stereotyping, already…

Not so fast! If the theory is that people are happy not because of how rich they are, but how much richer they are than their neighbours, then if everyone suffers equally, there should be no change in overall happiness.

Of course, we then have to look at the elasticity of demand of food & etc…

p/s Hi!