Question of Life: Why We Are Unhappy?
Jessie J said in her lyric that “money can’t buy us happiness.”. However, some people counter this idea by saying that we are less happy if we don’t have much money. So, there are two groups who argue whether or not money can make us happy. People who say money doesn’t determine their happiness believe that it should come from inside. Happiness is our mind-set and it shouldn’t lay on the external factor. Meanwhile, those who oppose this idea say that money plays a significant role as a tool to open many options and afford many things to make us happy.
The narrative that money can make us happy doesn’t stand alone. Other factors that the majority believe in what makes us happy are dealing with marriage and children. This society standard dictates that happiness can be obtained by getting married and having children. When you can’t fulfill one or both of them, you will be perceived as an unhappy person. In the end, some people opt for getting married and having children to envision happiness like what the majority believe.
Let’s debunk the existing idea of parameters that make us happy. So far, it includes money, marriage, and children. Are these parameters valid to make people happy? Have you ever seen people who live without having much money doesn’t make them sad? Instead, they just feel content. Some people who live single and choose to not get married also happy because they have family and friends to take care of. They prefer to live single because it’s better than living in an abusive marriage. And some married couples choose to not have children because they think they are not ready to be good parents and can’t fulfill the children’s needs. It makes them happy rather than sinking themselves in their incapability of taking care of their children. On the other hand, it’s also all right if some people want to be happy through possessing money, marriage, and children. So, what does it imply? It implies that there’re so many spectrums of the definition of happiness. We can’t apply the uniform standard of happiness for all people, because everyone is different from one to another.
To answer the question of why we are unhappy, we need to take a look at fundamental things on a happiness’ variable outside the social and marital status spectrums. Everyone regardless of poor or rich, married or unmarried, having children or not can be unhappy. One common things of why people become unhappy is the existence of expectation gap. We are unhappy because our expectations of reality exceed our experience of reality. Hence, happiness is often determined by our expectations.
There are three types of expectation gaps that make us unhappy:
1. We are unhappy when our imagination exceeds reality
Imagination sometimes disappoints us when what we have been imagining doesn’t happen in reality. Take some examples, you are unhappy when your partner leaves you because you had already imagined living with him/her for the rest of your life. You are unhappy when the places you have visited during traveling don’t look as good as on Instagram. Information and image that we process enable us to create imaginations. It stimulates us to create a projection in the future. At that moment, we do expect reality lives up to our imagination.
2. We are unhappy when we compare our reality to the reality of others
We judge ourselves based on what we experience around us. We compare our income to our peers. We compare our appearance to other people. We compare our career path to other colleagues. We feel unhappy when what we have is less than what others have. We are only able to feel happy when we have better income, more good looking, and more success than the others. Such a condition makes us focus more on the rich, the famous, and the beautiful while paying less attention to the other aspects. We only keep ourselves feeling poorer and less successful than we actually are.
3. We are unhappy when our past reality is better than our present reality
We experience happiness when we get something better than what we already had. When we get a salary increase, career promotion, or partner who is more caring than your ex, we feel happy. That feeling exists because our present is improving than in past conditions. On the contrary, we are unhappy when our lives in the present are less achieving than in the past reality.
Those things are the reason of why expectation gap exists. We need to know why we are unhappy and how to handle it. We can’t succumb to society’s standard of happiness and should be more proactive in managing our expectation. Try not compare ourselves to others and live in the present. Don’t let others define your happiness since it’s within our control to feel happy.
To be genuinely happy is the interest of every human being. Happiness is paramount because it enables us to be productive, social functioning, and create a better outcome. You deserve to be happy regardless of your social class, marital status, and material possession.
