We are all born knowing how to be happy, but for one reason or another that feeling gets lost for a lot of us. It is replaced by stress, sadness, exhaustion, or maybe even nothing at all. Emptiness has a strange way of consuming us, too. My question is, if we all exist with the innate ability to be happy, why do we forget how to do it and how do we find that feeling again?
The reality is there is no clear answer. You can drink as much herbal tea as you want, you can organize your room a million times, you can exercise every single day for a year, you can follow the steps of every mental health blog out there, but at the end of the day your mind will always win. That is the one thing that you cannot change, so fighting it is useless.
This doesn’t mean that happiness isn’t achievable. This only means that it is more complicated than the “ten easy steps” that almost every article on Google suggests. It is more complicated than “knowing that everything is temporary” and “loving yourself.” Though I’m sure that loving yourself helps greatly when looking for happiness, there is so much that goes into that. It is not a switch that you can just turn on. You can’t just wake up one day and love yourself, believe me, I’ve tried.
So, what can you do? In all honesty, I am in no way the best person to give advice on this, because I haven’t found true happiness myself. However, I have experienced it briefly, and I can tell you what got me there.
For me, happiness lies in music and people and nature. Driving at nighttime on dark streets with good music acting as the soundtrack to this beautiful moment that is filled with the laughter of my friends is what bliss feels like. Concerts are my heaven and sunsets are things I cling to, which I guess could be the secret. Find something to cling to and let that bring you closer to whatever your happiness is.
There is a quote that I see very often. It is “find what you love and let it kill you.” Though this is very poetic and it sounds beautiful, it is horrible advice. If you are not happy already and you have not found what you love, it feels like you are slowly dying anyway. So, why would you want something you love to just continue the process? No, there are far better things to do with life than slowly die. I don’t have a simple answer on how to be happy, but what I can tell you is find what you love and let it help you truly live.