What are the most important things to living a happy life? At the risk of sounding cliche, I think that being comfortable with oneself, and really liking oneself, has got to be in the top 5, if not number one on the list. That being said, I think it is unfortunate that so many people have so little control over their own self-concept and self-confidence. We all like to believe that we are responsible for our own selves and that if someone is miserable or unhappy they somehow deserve it or brought it on themselves. This ideology (which many of us have been told time and again, perhaps in attempts to motivate us to take charge of our lives and somehow “feel better”) serves mostly to justify and rationalize people’s current state of mind and existence, which is usually not of their own making.
As small children we are entirely dependent on others, out of control of our own lives. We learn everything we know about the world from the people around us – mostly from our parents and other members of our immediate family, but also from our neighbors, teachers, peers, and even the media to which we are exposed. These dependencies and interactions construct our foundational worldviews, which stay with us for much longer than we would like, and which influence our future perspectives and states-of-mind much more than the rugged individualists would like to believe. They indirectly determine the reactions and responses we will have to future occurrences in our lives – events which themselves go on to shape our worldview, but in a less profound way than the earlier experiences do.
Why is that the case? I am still considering this, but I think it may have something to do with how we internalize the “truths” we learn as children, and somehow those “truths” remain resistant to change, even in the face of new and contrary learning as an adult. I would not endores a completely determinist philosophy by saying that we cannot change these mindsets, but I do think that it is so extremely difficult to do so that it rarely happens. And that may be why sad people are the way they are.
