Happiness Is a Feeling of Well-Being or Joy

1. Happiness is a feeling of well-being or joy.

2. There is a lot of complexity when we talk about a thing like happiness. It can mean different things to different people, but the basic idea of happiness is just feeling good about life, either for an instant or an extended period of time. Happiness can be as simple a pleasure as enjoying a song or savoring a favorite food, and can also be a complex feeling like when two people fall in love and their brains are flooded with joy. When a father is watching his son take his first steps or ride a bike for his first time he feel happiness. Happiness can also be an even deeper rooted emotion, when one achieves a genuine contentedness through spiritual or religious exploration and achievement. To sum it up, happiness can range from experiencing very short term pleasure, to achieving a long term content in one's life. Although simple pleasures can cause short spurts of happiness, true, lasting happiness cannot be achieved through carnal pleasures. Worldly endeavors like gambling and recreational drug use may give pleasure to the participant, but this is not happiness, merely a cheap thrill.

3. The human emotion of happiness, although a complex concept, is a pretty universal one. Throughout history, it seems that all cultures have been aware of happiness, and interested in achieving it. The etymology of the word in Indo-European languages suggests that the word stems from the idea of luck or fortune. Many westerners do seem to tie the two together; that to be happy, good things just have to happen to you. That to live a good life, one simply must be fortunate and have things fall their way. In many branches of Eastern philosophy and religion, a converse approach to achieving happiness is proposed. A philosophy like Taoism for example recognizes two sides of happiness, the outside world that one can not control, and the inner self that one can. This concept leads to the idea that a person's well-being should not be based only on the tangible material world but more so on inner peace. These ideals are in some but not all ways different to the Judeo-Christian approach to happiness. While the "self" doesn't tend to be a prominent topic in these Western religions as much, devaluing materialistic and worldly possessions, like in Taoism is. Another characteristic of the Judeo-Christian philosophy is that happiness is found through righteousness and good works, thus giving the practitioner a clean conscience, and a sense of contempt. No matter what the culture or time period, happiness has been ripe on the mind of mankind, and it will continue to be until it is universally achieved.

4. When I was a little boy, my Grandpa Ciaccio used to take me for walks in the mud, well not always in the mud, but a lot of the time. We would talk about baseball, bugs, cowboys and other stuff that both boys and men are interested in. This is my first memory