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This video shows how people all over the world achieve happiness in a different way. I believe that happiness is not the same for everyone and that hapiness could be sleep for someone and it could be waking up for other people.

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Even though she is still healthy and lively, Mrs. Xie has already prepared the clothes she will be buried in.

An 86-year-old Chinese woman who lives in Dongshan, a city on China's southeastern coast, Xie has an active life, cooking for friends at the local Buddhist temple and joining in the chants there. Yet she has already bought the pants, shirt, shoes, earrings and purse she will wear after she dies, as well as an embroidered yellow pillow for her head. She had a portrait taken that will be displayed at her funeral. And she wrapped the items neatly in a cardboard box to await her death.

For many people in the West, picking out an outfit for your own funeral might seem sad or macabre. But Xie and her friends see it as a cause for reassurance, even celebration.

The video below, in which Xie shows off her burial clothes to her friends and a visiting researcher, Becky Hsu, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgetown, makes the scene feel almost like a party. Xie's friends laugh as she shows off her outfit, congratulate her on getting a deal on her shoes, and scold her for paying too much for fancy earrings.

"It's a happy thing," another Chinese woman told Hsu about preparing burial clothes. "Everybody does it. I've had mine for more than 10 years!"

The idea that getting ready for one's funeral can be "a happy thing" shows just how much ideas of happiness can differ from country to country. And it suggests that creating a definition of happiness that holds true for people around the world - a central preoccupation of researchers who study well-being - is not as straightforward as it seems.

Each year, packs of sociologists and survey workers descend on different countries to ask people about their happiness. Surveys such as Pew's "Ladder of Life", The World Values Survey and the United Nations' World Happiness Report measure and rank countries in terms of their well-being.

One goal of these surveys is to figure out what ingredients make a happy society. Critics say the measure that most countries use to track progress - gross domestic product - excludes some of the most important parts of human life. GDP doesn't distinguish, for example, between $10 million earned cutting down a rainforest and $10 million earned delivering a new cancer drug. But by paying attention to wellness and happiness, researchers can help guide local and national governments in making policy and adopting the kind of economic development that benefits people most.

Often, these surveys suggest that one of the most important components in happiness is actually wealth. Wealthier countries tend to have higher standards of living, better health care and education, cleaner environments, and more support for families than poorer ones do. The map below, from the U.N.'s World Happiness Report, shows that many of the "happiest" countries, marked in green, are more developed ones.

But wealth is not the only factor: Happiness surveys also try to capture things that common economic metrics overlook, such as a sustainable environment, social progress, personal growth and self-acceptance.

There are big challenges with these surveys, however. Measures of happiness that work equally well in countries all around the world are a Holy Grail for sociologists - sought after, but rarely found. Critics point out that different surveys tend to produce substantially different, and sometimes surprising, results, and they question whether these measures are really capturing happiness, or something else.

"All those pieces that come out ... are like, 'Denmark is the happiest country in the world!' And then another piece comes out that is like, 'Colombia is the happiest country in the world!" Hsu says. "It's hard to tell what the questions are measuring. A question like, 'How happy are you, from 1 to 5?' has a lot of problems."

Perhaps the biggest problem is how the concept of "happiness" varies in different cultures and languages.

In English, for example, the word "happy" can refer to different things. It might mean a fleeting mood you feel when someone surprises you with a gift or you think of friends and family. Or it could refer to a deeper and less malleable state of satisfaction with your life.

But not all languages refer to happiness the same way. A paper published in the International Journal of Language and Culture notes that the question, "How happy are you?" is difficult to ask in many languages, and couldn't even be properly posed in the English of Shakespeare or Chaucer's time.

For example, Denmark is often ranked among the world's happiest countries - which is something of a mystery to those who have lived among the relatively solemn Danes. Some researchers say the reason is that happiness in Danish is often translated as lykke - a term that can describe a kind of everyday well-being that might be brought on by a nice cup of coffee or a slice of bread with cheese. Others argue that the Danish results might be due in part to a cultural reluctance to burden strangers with their troubles.

Other studies suggests that German, French, Polish and Russian speakers use their equivalent terms for "happy" or "happiness" to refer to a state that's much rarer than English or Danish terms. Still other research argues that, in many languages, the term for "happy" involves a much stronger role for luck or fortune than it does in modern English - closer to what "happy" meant in English several centuries ago.

In Chinese, there are actually several different terms for happiness, each of which have a slightly different meaning.

Hsu and her colleagues are carrying out their own happiness survey in China, with the hope of learning how to better measure happiness not just in China, but in other countries, as well. Their survey focuses on three dimensions of happiness - a good mood, a good life and a sense of whether one's life has meaning.

Hsu breaks those meanings down in the diagram below, which shows that the English words "happy" and "happiness" encompass just part of those definitions. On the right, she maps one of the Chinese words for happiness, xingfu. Unlike the English translation of happiness, xingfu refers not to a good mood, but a good life, as well as a life with meaning.

In Chinese, each of these three kinds of happiness can actually be translated as a different word, says Hsu - xingfu for a good life, you yiyi for meaning and kuaile for a good mood. By using those three words to ask different questions, researchers may be able to measure dimensions of happiness in Chinese that are often brushed over in English.

Another common problem with happiness surveys, says Hsu, is that they are heavily influenced by Western social science and particularly economics, which has a relatively individualistic and utilitarian view of human life. For Americans especially, the idea of the pursuit of happiness - enshrined in the Declaration of Independence - is often related to personal liberty and individualism.

Western-made surveys tend to ask about the individual person in isolation, and ignore their relationships - even as more and more research today suggests that social relationships are one of the most important factors in a person's well-being.

Hsu mentions Pew's poll, which asks people to picture their position on a 10-step "ladder of life," in which the bottom step represents the worst possible life for them and the top rung is their best possible life.

"It doesn't make sense and it's very individualistic, because you're alone on this ladder!" Hsu says of the survey. "Where are all your people?"

The Western approach may not necessarily do a good job of capturing happiness in China - and other countries - where the collective concerns of a family often outrank individual ones. So Hsu's surveys have focused much more on social relations - asking people who they ate dinner with last night, whether it was fun, and who they have given money to in the past month.

The research suggests that family is extremely important to happiness in China - even for young Chinese, whose consumerist tendencies and urban lives look similar to those in the West in other respects.

It might seem strange, but this focus on the family may help explain why Mrs. Xie and her friends have such strong feelings about the clothes they will be buried in. Because many Chinese have a strong sense of connection with their family members, even ancestors who have passed on, they have different and less negative attitudes toward death, Hsu's research suggests. That greater sense of connection between living and dead family members is one reason that preparing for burial can be a "happy" event.

Hsu points out that Chinese families frequently acknowledge and "interact" with the dead through rituals that give people a sense of closer connection to the deceased. For example, families visit the tombs of relatives on holidays to pray, and burn paper money, paper clothes, and other things that the dead person "needs" in the afterlife, as in the video below, which Hsu shot in western China.

So death entails more of a sense of continuity with one's ancestors and family members - unlike in America, where death is seldom portrayed in such a positive light.

For many people in China, a happy life includes having a good death, and that means being prepared - even your clothes.

"It's not that death itself is a good thing, it's that it is the next thing," Hsu says. "So you can have a good one. You can do it well."

You might also like: How to predict the future better than anyone else Why violence is so contagious Surreal photos show the afterlives of America's once-great movie theaters

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What people around the world mean when they say they're happy

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Even though she is still healthy and lively, Mrs. Xie has already prepared the clothes she will be buried in. An 86-year-old Chinese woman who lives in Dongshan, a city on China's southeastern coast, Xie has an active life, cooking for friends at the local Buddhist temple and joining in the chants there.

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I feel like Gatsby was happy when he was in love with Daisy when he first met her and when. I don't think he was happy when he was working his whole life just for Daisy even though she was married to Tom. Gatsby would have been happy if he could have just married Daisy when he first met her, but she ended up not being with him and he got killed.

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All of these connect because they all talk about different ways to acheive happiness. Acheiving and gaining happiness is different for all people. Sometimes people need to experiment and experience different things in their lifetime to find happiness. Overall, people need to find their own happinees and it won't allways be the same for everyone else.

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This article talks about how and why so many people are unhappy.

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Robert Louis Stephenson once wrote: "I have a little shadow who goes in and out with me; and what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; and I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed."

Clever poem, but what is he talking about?

The ego, of course. It is the chief culprit in human unhappiness. Yet, most people live and die with this inner monster running their lives. They neither know this nor how to overcome it. If they did, they would take the necessary steps to bring an end to it.

"What is ego?" you ask.

It is your "social self," as Martha Beck has labeled it. It is what the philosopher Immanuel Kant described as your "precious little self." It is the illusory image of you, the karmic collection of all your life experiences. It is not really you, of course, any more than the you, you see in a mirror is really you either. It is the image of you instead, the self you project to the world. It is, therefore, what someone described as "your make-believe self," or your "social mask."

Ego is distinguished by the fact that it is self-centered, self-obsessed, and self-absorbed. It has one aim, as Wayne Dyer describes it, and that is to " Edge God Out." It is, therefore, the human condition, the one reality all humans share in common. The Biblical equivalent to the ego is described throughout the Old and New Testaments as "sin." It is that part of you that you may think of as you but it really isn't you at all. It is instead the "shadow you," as Stephenson described it, or the "dog," within you, as the German philosopher Nietzsche is purported to have once called it.

Since the ego is this little monster inside everyone and is the cause, not only for personal unhappiness, but virtually all the relationship problems and social evils of our time, is there anything we can do-that I can do-to overcome it?

Here are three suggestions:

1. Know, first, that the talk that goes on inside your head is mostly the voice of your ego. Since I have written extensively about this in the book, The Enoch Factor: The Sacred Art of Knowing God, there is no need to go into great detail here.

I will say this much, however. Teach yourself to observe the voice in your head. Learn to watch what's being said. And, most importantly, do not believe much of any of it. Instead, question it, at the least. This part of you who does the watching is beyond the ego self and, so it is much closer to who you really are anyway.

2. Second, do not fight the ego. You'll lose almost every time. After thousands of years of human history, the ego has become quite clever. It is best just to recognize it within yourself, the conversations the self has with its-self and the many times it feels offended by something someone else has said or done. Just notice when the ego in you begins judging someone else or some situation in which you find yourself. Know that when you catch yourself complaining, arguing, debating with someone, defending yourself, feeling threatened, this all stems from your ego. It isn't who you really are. So, do not shame yourself. Just recognize the ego when he, like the serpent in the story of the original pair - Adam and Eve - lifts his ugly head and starts talking to you...complaining to you...expressing its outrage over something about which it feels offended. No need to fight the ego. No need to judge yourself or condemn yourself when you catch the ego behaving in its customarily self-centered fashions. Just recognize it. The recognition alone is enough to diminish the ego's control over you. Notice, too, that in Stephenson's poem, he writes, "And I see him jump before me when I jump into my bed." That's the kind of observer you must become. As the observer, what Eckhart Tolle calls "the watcher," you can train yourself to recognize the antics of the "little me" inside of you. If you will make this your spiritual practice, you will in time overcome the ego.

3. Finally, know that the way to greater happiness is the way of ego-death. Ego, the self-centered you, will diminish in you as you become more and more aware of its presence within. Awareness, observation, recognition of the ego is to the ego what the nails were in Jesus' cross. They will nail your ego to that place where it must diminish and then die once-and-for-all. When Jesus surrendered to death on the cross, the ego in him lost all control over him. So, the more you become aware of the ego's presence within you, the less control it will have over you...the less unhappiness and drama it will create in your life and relationships. You'll discover yourself freer of self-judgment (itself the cause of much unhappiness); you'll discover you are much less judgmental of others and situations (another cause of much inner suffering). When you judge another, for example, you are in a mental state of resistance. And, as a spiritual teacher of mine loves to say, "What you resist, only persists." That is to say, if you don't like something someone is doing but sit in continual judgment upon them (most of which, coincidentally, takes place in your heard), you should not be surprised to see their unwanted behavior proliferate and your own inner suffering to escalate. Why not recognize this resistance within yourself, instead? After all, it is none other than the ego, and you can be free of it.

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Robert Louis Stephenson once wrote: "I have a little shadow who goes in and out with me; and what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; and I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed."

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This article takes about how people are happy in a Buddhist view. It talks about how people are happy when they lead a meaningful life.

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What makes people happy? This question takes us to the heart of Buddhist economics-to our true self.

According to Buddhist economics, human nature is generous and altruistic, even as we also care about ourselves. Buddha taught that all people suffer from their own mental states, with feelings of discontent that come from desiring more and more. The Dalai Lama tells us that the feeling of not having enough and wanting more does not arise from the inherent desirability of the objects we are seeking, but from our own mental illusions. Buddha taught us how to end suffering by changing our states of mind, which translates into finding happiness through living a meaningful life.

In contrast to Buddhist economics, traditional economics holds that human nature is self-centered and that people care only about themselves as they push ahead to maximize their incomes and fancy lifestyles. According to this approach, buying and consuming-shopping for new shoes or playing a new video game-will make you happy. But soon you grow tired of the shoes, become disappointed with the game, and are off shopping again. In this endless cycle of desire, we are continuously left wanting more without ever finding lasting satisfaction

Traditional economics is based on hedonic happiness, or personal pleasure with the avoidance of pain, which focuses on pursuing money and buying things that make you feel good, at least in the moment. This short-lived happiness fits in well with our materialistic, goal-oriented economy. We chase our dreams of large wealth or great power or awesome sex or a major championship in the belief that they will bring us lasting happiness. Our purchase, or promotion, or love affair gives us a high. Yet that high soon wears off, and we are off chasing the next high.

Buddhist economics rests upon Aristotle's eudaimonic happiness, where happiness comes from self-realization, and living a worthy and moral life in service to others and the community. Aristotle teaches us, "He is happy who lives in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life." He also says, "The contemplative life is happiest."[i]

The Dalai Lama warned that material gain is based on an erroneous assumption that what we buy "can by itself alone, provide us with all the satisfaction we require." He teaches us that "genuine happiness is characterized by inner peace and arises in the context of our relationships with others."[ii] In Buddhist economics, people strive to act ethically, which includes not harming others, even not ruining others' experiences or happiness. For example, you cause harm when your words or actions anger others, or make them (and yourself) feel desire or attachment, hatred or aggression, delusion, pride, and envy, or other mental poisons (called kleshas in Buddhism).

Finding inner happiness is one of the goals of Buddhist economics. Buddhism holds that we attain true freedom and peace only when we quit our mental habits of reacting with cravings for stimuli ("I've got to own that!" "Win this game!") or reacting with aversion ("I can't stand that!" "Defeat it!"). Instead, Buddhism says to quiet your mind: notice the beauty as you go for a walk, enjoy your food as you eat, connect more intimately with your friends.

Economists have demonstrated that people care about fairness, and want to be part of an organization or society that they consider just and fair.[iii] When psychologists study what makes people happy, they find that being kind to others makes people happier.[iv] People only need moments of compassion to build upon, because there is a positive feedback loop: when you do a kind deed (take your mom to lunch), you become happier, which makes it more likely you will do another kind act (help your neighbor carry in groceries). Kindness makes you happier, and happier people engage in more acts of kindness.[v]

Positive psychology demonstrates how well-being comes from experiencing a life that has meaning beyond merely feeling happy, which complements Buddhist economics. For example, positive psychologist Seligman teaches exercises to promote well-being based on engagement, good relationships, accomplishment and purpose.[vi]

In Buddhist economics, we discriminate between real happiness built upon a fully developed mindful life, and temporary happiness built around money and never-ending desires. In Buddhist economics, people do not aim to maximize their own income, because we want to ensure the happiness and well-being of all people.

Buddhist economics provides guidance both for restructuring the economy to place concerns about inequality, sustainability, and the human spirit at its center, and for leading meaningful, happy lives. "Practice compassion to be happy" replaces "More is better." "Maximize your own position" becomes "Everyone's well-being is connected."

Everyone deserves to be happy. Together we can live meaningful lives in a sustainable world!

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What makes people happy? This question takes us to the heart of Buddhist economics-to our true self. According to Buddhist economics, human nature is generous and altruistic, even as we also care about ourselves. Buddha taught that all people suffer from their own mental states, with feelings of discontent that come from desiring more and more.

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Of the people that responded to the form I sent out, only %57.1 people said they were happy. That means that the other %42.9 are not happy. When people were saying what makes them happy, there were four responses. %85.8 said that they get happy by the family/friends, money, and sports. The other %14.2 said that the enlightenment of god brings them happiness.