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So...What Does It Mean To Be Happy?  How Does One Attain True Happiness?

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So...What Does It Mean To Be Happy?  How Does One Attain True Happiness?

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Drum Roll, Please! Click the video below to see my final conclusions.

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A Connection: Exploring Happiness Through Song

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A Connection: Exploring Happiness Through Song

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Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof!  Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth!
Pharrell Williams's iconic "Happy" (music attached below) takes on an upbeat and optimistic view about happiness and what it can be.  Watching a music video of people of all ages get up and dance to the same song made me want to sing along. Pharrell's video creates a vision that happiness can be easily attainable for all, no matter what kind of position someone may be in. It definitely contrasts to some of the other "gloomy" and "doomy" outlooks other authors have in their works.

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Pharrell Williams - Happy (Official Video)

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Click below to see a LIVE feed of tweets using #happiness.  What better way to learn about what others consider happiness to be than to see a live feed on Twitter?

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See the document below containing an important quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

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In his article, "Happiness Guaranteed: The Backwardness of the American Dream," writer Cosmin Gheorghe explores how the ideology behind American Dream has changed over time. Realizing that people should have to work hard in order to be successful (and then achieve happiness), Gheorghe also emphasizes that the American Dream has changed, sometimes imprisoning those into dreaming of something that is not realistic.

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(Statue of Liberty in construction in sculptor Bartholdi's studio, Rue de Chazelles, Paris 1885)

It was my pleasure to chat today with another true culture change catalyst: Rich Sheridan, Cofounder and CEO at MenloInnovations and author of Joy, Inc.
There are four main issues that I take from my conversation with Rich, also reflected in some ways in Arianna Huffington's latest book, Thrive:

1. Backwardness of a Dream: In the classic version of the American Dream, happiness is the result of achievement: first you need to become something (successful, rich, famous, whatever) and only after that you will be happy. Happiness is seen like a sort of cake, which you will eat only after finishing all your homework and your dinner's vegetables, both under strict parental supervision. Happiness needs thus to be pursued and, as if it wasn't enough, the pursuing of happiness is guaranteed by the Constitution.

We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. [...] Most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: if I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier! This is scientifically broken and backwards. SHAWN ACHOR, TEDx, "The Happy Secret to Better Work"

2. Prisoners of a Dream.
If happiness is a sort of consequence of a lifetime of hard work, then we are all imprisoned by it. Whole nations and organizations are chasing the prey of happiness, are running the treadmill of achieving and having. We count the years, weeks and days left until retirement, this sublime moment when we will allow ourselves to feel and be happy, when we will finally do all the things that we have been always passionate about and wanted to do, but we couldn't since we were busy working hard in order to be happy.

Do you know who else are counting the days "until..."? Yes, exactly, the incarcerated ones, who scribble the walls of their cells with dates and little rods, counting the time until they will be freed. And you know what happens to so many of those long-term prisoners? They end up back in prison, for incarceration feels more familiar and safe to them than the unpredictability and responsibility that come with freedom.

3. Two minuses do make a plus: entering backwards in the backwardness of the American Dream. It is entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, mainly the millennials, who have had the brilliant idea (and the guts!) to disrupt the whole system by entering backwards in the backwardness of the American dream. Happiness, they say, is not an end result, a reward for 45 years of behaving yourself and correctly running the treadmill. Happiness is something that one experiences from the beginning and throughout, it is the source of work that contains purpose and passion.

4. Education.
All parents and teachers that I advise want their children/students to be self-sufficient, fulfilled individuals, able to establish meaningful relationships. And at the same time, paradoxically, most want to accomplish these goals by doing exactly the opposite: requiring their children to obey. They reward conformism and obedience and they punish disobedience. They train children to function in accordance with external incentives (reward, and punishment -- which now they mask by calling it "consequence") and prevent them from constructing internal meaning as a way to regulate their behavior, choices and decisions. At the other extreme, but with similar results, we have parents who have no ability to say "no" to their children, ending up as a sort of servants of a "tyrant" child.

It is not accidentally that you read this article on the Huffington Post. For Arianna Huffington and Rich Sheridan are two wonderful leaders who have performed a daring chiropractor maneuver to the American Dream, promoting happiness as the source and not the moving target of a satisfaction guaranteed society. Both are key players in a global revolution, aimed at restoring i ntercultural communication and relationship by focusing on the preservation of meaning, passion and purpose.

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Happiness Guaranteed: The Backwardness of the American Dream

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(Statue of Liberty in construction in sculptor Bartholdi's studio, Rue de Chazelles, Paris 1885) It was my pleasure to chat today with another true culture change catalyst: Rich Sheridan, Cofounder and CEO at MenloInnovations and author of Joy, Inc.

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Throughout this exploration, I have done some pondering myself about what makes me truly happy. Family, traveling, and helping others are at the top of my list. I often try to implement my other passions into what makes me happy. For example, one of my favorite ways to keep track of my travels is through photography. Attached below, you will see a link to my VSCO page, where I often post pictures I have taken that log where I have been, who I have encountered, and what I have learned. Additionally, significant others (especially my dog!) will occasionally show up on my page.  By logging my sources of happiness through one of my greatest passions, I have created a way to constantly relive  memories that make me happy, and hopefully I can share my experiences with others to make them happier, too.

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A Connection: Exploring Happiness and Guilt

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A Connection: Exploring Happiness and Guilt

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Check out the info graphic below to learn more about the relationship between happiness and guilt!

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Often times, I wonder how professionals in the world can help others attain happiness.  Connecting happiness to one's spirit, Deborah Walters tells stories about her patients who have struggled finding happiness in a life filled with stress.  While taking a more spiritual approach, Deborah offers both religious and secular solutions to obtain one's happiness.  She focuses on finding an "axis point" that one can revolve around.  After seeing this video, I believe that one's axis point can be just about anything: a friend, a pet, an object, a job, etc.  Regardless, Walters's story emphasizes that no matter one's beliefs, happiness is attainable by understanding one's own needs.

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Attaining Happiness | Deborah Walters

Jake Klimek on May 16 2018

BahaiTeachings.org Presents... "Life was meant for happiness and not sorrow, for pleasure and not grief," says Baha'i health care professional and author Deborah Walters. She sees patients who tell terribly unhappy stories and have enormous suffering-and asks them "What's at the center of your life? Where do you spend your time, your money, your love?" Life is created for happiness, Walters says. We need to put something eternal, something light-filled, at the center of our lives-which will change your whole entire perspective. "Human happiness is founded on spiritual behavior," the teachings of the Baha'i Faith say. Our existence is fundamentally mystical in nature-there is light within us.

Launched as a beta version in 2009, SafeShare.tv has gained popularity as the safest way to Watch and Share YouTube and Vimeo videos, and is widely used all around the globe by educators so their students can watch educational material without the fear of inappropriate videos showing up.

Are you sure you want to do this?

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SafeShare.tv - Attaining Happiness | Deborah Walters...

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BahaiTeachings.org Presents... "Life was meant for happiness and not sorrow, for pleasure and not grief," says Baha'i health care professional and author Deborah Walters. She sees patients who tell terribly unhappy stories and have enormous suffering-and asks them "What's at the center of your life? Where do you spend your time, your money, your love?"

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When we think of The Great Depression, happy times are not what first typically come to mind.  So, among immense poverty and Hoovervilles, how did people stay happy?
For me personally, I would have a difficult time staying happy during this time period.  My great-grandma grew up during the Great Depression, and she has told me stories of eating meals consisting of only a slice of bread and butter.  Given the bustling life we live today, I cannot imagine having to go through a time like that.  However, my great-grandma, then a young girl, found happiness in playing games with her friends and neighbors.
Many adults (like the ones pictured below), however, used other methods to be 'happy.'  One particular method included drinking alcohol.  While Prohibition and The Great Depression did overlap for a few years, people still found a way to obtain booze (sometimes illegally!) in order to stay 'happy.'  This raises some serious questions.  Why are people willing to break the law in order to stay 'happy?'  Is it just for a guilty pleasure?  Does alcohol really get in the way of finding happiness? Why do people still resort to alcohol for happiness today?

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When looking into the relationship between happiness and age, the graphic below tells an interesting story. It seems as though happiness levels are relatively high in childhood but then decrease to an all time low at around forty years of age before increasing for the remainder of life. This raises some serious questions. Why are people at around forty unhappy? Does it have anything to do with one's profession?

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A Connection: Veruca Salt in "Willy Wonka"

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A Connection: Veruca Salt in "Willy Wonka"

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In the famed 1971 film "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," young girl Veruca Salt is given whatever she wants, whenever she wants. But, obviously demonstrated in this video, she is not happy (she wants the golden egg now!), but she is instead quite selfish (and she suffers the consequences!). The video brings up questions that must be addressed in regard to the relationship between happiness and money.  Does wealth always lead to happiness?  Is happiness that is derived from wealth long-lasting?
In Veruca's case, she forces her father to buy materialistic items in order to only temporarily satisfy her needs, causing an insatiable hunger for more.  Willy Wonka uses Veruca's selfishness to teach a lesson about happiness and money to those in the world who may not realize right away that money may not always yield happiness.

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Veruca Salt: I Want It Now!  (Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) 1971

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Click below to see an ongoing log that will track my knowledge about the concept of Happiness over the course of this project!

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CNN Writer Winnie So uses various methods of rhetoric, including statistics (logos) and storytelling to appeal emotion (pathos) to convey that travel and experience is a source of true happiness.  So interviewed several scientists and researchers and discovered that travel is socially positive, educative of other cultures, and provides life-changing experiences that stick with us forever.  As social beings, travel is a great outlet to find true happiness while exploring the place we call home.

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At the conclusion of a recent (CNN) - Intelligence Squared Asia debate on whether "Money Can't Buy Happiness," the audience was split -- 49% agreed and 49% disagreed, with 2% undecided.

But when it came to travel, there was one very obvious winning premise -- travel makes us all happy.

As a luxury travel planner, I thought it was pretty obvious: travel makes us happy, but one needs money to buy wondrous, inspiring travel experiences. Ergo, money can buy happiness.

I had been inspired by an invitation to this year's PURE Life Experiences conference to ask the debaters: does travel make you happy? Where have you been that's made you most happy or unhappy? (See their answers below)

We are now living in the "Dream Society," the organizers of PURE Life Experiences told me in their well-scripted promotional email, in which "Contrary to the procurement of mass tourism products, the creation of happiness through engaging journeys is never based on the knowledge of every detail in advance."

Experiential travel is about presenting the customer with the surprise of the "unknown," the luxury of "unexpected choices" and the empowerment of "overcoming hurdles" (such as scaling a peak) so that he feels he has completed a "journey towards self-actualization."

Travel makes us happy, because it promises us the self-discovery needed to reach the pinnacle of Abraham Maslow's view of the human hierarchy of needs. Before him, Carl Jung called it individuation.

But who needs to spend hours on a boring couch and oodles of cash at the psychoanalyst's office when one can spend that time and money on a much more pleasurable trip learning how to play polo at an Argentinean estancia?

I think philosopher and author Alain de Botton hit it on the head when he wrote: "Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go."

Travel makes us happy, because it offers us the opportunity to step outside our well-worn, self-constructed, plebian realities and provides a platform to explore and practice our ideal visions for ourselves -- who we might be if we weren't married to our fears and anxieties about safety, security and status.

I could not agree more. I founded a luxury travel planning service based on these exact same ideas shortly after 9/11.

Neither terrorism nor SARS detered me from pursuing and promoting the self-actualizing capabilities of experiential travel.

I called my company WANLILU Play. WANLILU translates from Mandarin as "10,000 miles." As the Chinese saying goes: one is wiser for traveling 10,000 miles than studying 10,000 scrolls.

I saw that the Hong Kong travel industry was only offering commodified, off-the-shelf, instant travel products -- "See the greatest hits of Europe in 14 days!"

This was travel as fast-food rather than a heart-warming dish of homemade gnocchi by your friend's Italian grandma.

I wanted to admire the awesomeness of the massive migration of wildebeest charging through the savannah plains of Masai Mara from the lofty heights of a hot air balloon at sunrise. That made me happy, and I wanted others to share in that joy.

But then, as the years came and went, as the author Dr. Stefan Klein explains, I adapted to those happy experiences.

Something is wondrous only in so far as it is surprising to the senses. And then I remembered another inspiring aspect of my trip to Kenya -- the joy of interacting with Masai schoolchildren, seeing their smiles as we gave them books and stationery.

We are social beings, as the philosopher A.C. Grayling reminds; we derive more happiness from giving than receiving.

Giving and helping make us feel good about ourselves. And so now we are starting to see a boom in experiential travel that helps satisfy philanthropic urges and our sense of do-goodness with sustainable, eco-friendly travel products.

One of the central arguments for money not being able to buy happiness was the research that affluent countries such as the United States have not reported higher levels of happiness to match its growth in GDP. But that makes sense if we are constantly adapting to our higher levels of happiness.

Yet, it is this constant resetting of our internal happiness scale that's driving affluent travelers to seek more happiness and welfare-inducing experiences.

As the upcoming Condé Nast Traveler World Savers Congress in Singapore is touting, travel has the power "to foster a sustainable future in Asia," and no doubt the world.

If travel can save us, no doubt it can make us happy.

Does travel make you happy? "The pleasures of discovery, the joy of meeting people from other backgrounds and finally the thrill of tasting food I would not get at home usually far exceed all strains of traveling."

I am most happy: "Wherever I feel connected to the history of humankind or of our planet. Like in the National Museums of Cairo, Athens and Delhi, marveling at the beginnings of Western and Asian cultures. On Manhattan, where millions of immigrants made their first steps into a new life. And any place from where I get a glimpse of the peaks of the Alps, or even better, the Himalayas."

I am unhappy: "Wherever I encounter pointless human misery as in many deprived rural areas in Asia, or in slums."

Does travel make you happy? "Yes, because travel expands the mind and spirit, is educative, and puts one in touch with new people and ideas. The places that make me happy are great cities with vibrant culture, and beautiful countryside."

Does travel make you happy? "Very much so. Most of the places I travel to make me very happy. My eyes are refreshed and my spirit renewed by the scenery of places such as Angkor Wat.

"Places like Palestine, however, make me decidedly unhappy. I was there 10 years ago and the entangled political situation with no easy solution was depressing. Tibet is another place I am obsessed with and, though I love the place, the circumstances of the people make my heart ache."

Lewis Iwu, former World Universities Debating Champion

Does travel make you happy? "Travel makes me very happy. I enjoy discovering new cultures and embracing the history of the country I'm in. I'm lucky to live in a cosmopolitan city so it makes travel even more interesting.

"I spent several months traveling around the United States. As a fan of American TV shows it was great to actually visit some of the cities that the shows were based on.

"I also enjoyed Japan. It was a unique culture that I hadn't experienced before ... and the food was fantastic. The only part of the trip which made me unhappy was the karaoke -- mainly because I'm awful at singing."

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Winnie So.

Winnie So is a journalist and travel planner.

Editor's note: This article was previously published in 2011. It was reformatted and republished in 2017.

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At the conclusion of a recent (CNN) - Intelligence Squared Asia debate on whether "Money Can't Buy Happiness," the audience was split -- 49% agreed and 49% disagreed, with 2% undecided. But when it came to travel, there was one very obvious winning premise -- travel makes us all happy.

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Before we dive into this journey, it is important to first come up with a definition for happiness.  Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Acacia Parks, PhD, in the article attached below starts with identifying what happiness is not.  Diving below the superficial aspects of happiness, the article explains that there is more to being happy than what meets the eye.  Happiness is NOT necessarily having money; happiness is NOT found in a final destination.  Happiness IS the experiences we have; happiness IS continuous satisfaction.  Happiness is a part of the journey through life.