Features

What everyone wants

Posted on: May 16, 2007

What everyone wants
By Alyson Carson

Everyone searches for it in their life. Few people truly find it. True joy is sought after in every culture around the world. Now, you must understand the difference between joy and happiness, because many people do find happiness. Happiness is fleeting. It is short-term. Happiness is what you get when your basketball team wins the state championship. You’re on cloud nine for a while, but it eventually wears off. Joy is a general feeling that you always have. If you have joy, when you come across hard times you will still have it. If you only have happiness, when you come across hard times you will fall into despair.

People tend to confuse joy and happiness, even though they know the feeling they want. They want joy that doesn’t leave. They want to feel secure in feeling joyful. Let me illustrate the problem with happiness. If you have 1 unit of happiness then when that moment passes you will be -1 unit. That means you will have 1 unit of despair. When people confuse happiness with joy, the problem is really that the more happy things they find the farther they will go into despair when they lose that feeling. The result? People are afraid to look for joy, because they’ve confused it with happiness. Instead they start looking for a sedative.

What about joy? If you have 10 units of joy, it doesn’t pass. It’s not a moment for you to lose. Even if you run up against hard times you don’t go into despair. This doesn’t mean you will not feel sad at times. You will, but your sadness is fleeting rather than your happiness. The result? You can build up your joy and not worry about losing it and being worse off than you were before.

Let’s look at materialistic people. These people are luckier than the drug addict, because they have found slightly more joy in their lives. The problem with these people is that they look for more joy in outdoing their neighbor. Think about it, if you have a boat that’s bigger than your neighbor’s house, is that joy? No. That might be a sick sort of happiness, but it’s not joy. Take orphans in Ecuador as an example. They only have two shirts: one to wear and one to wash. If you gave then ten more shirts do you think that would bring them joy? Kind of silly, isn’t it?

What about the workaholic? They get a taste of achievement and getting money, but the novelty wears off. The next time they do the same thing, it’s not cool anymore. They’ve already done it. It’s not a big deal anymore. So they have to have a bigger achievement and make more money each time, otherwise they sink into despair. It becomes this spiral of needing to work more so they can have more achievement and make more money. Otherwise they’ll sink into despair. It becomes this addiction to achievement and money, because without it they have no happiness.

Let’s look at drug addicts. They are so fed up with despair that they turn to a means to alleviate that despair. They turn to drugs. The problem was that they were not finding joy. They didn’t even know how to find it, even though that’s what they wanted. They wanted a general feeling of contentedness, but they looked in the wrong place. So what happens? They end up worse and worse because of the effects of the drug, so they need more and more drugs. This leads in the opposite direction of joy, and it doesn’t even give happiness. It only ends up in pain. This is the extreme of where not to look for joy.

Many people have this false sense of what brings joy. Joy is not found in possessions. Joy is not found in escaping from life. Joy is not found in money. If you’re not happy without money, you won’t be happy with it. Joy is found inside you. Joy is found by having a strong foundation. This foundation consists of a few things, and I will tell you five of them. The first is having a connection to your higher self and a higher power, whatever you call it (God, the universe, Allah, or whatever). The second is integrity, the third is love, the fourth is hope, and the fifth is gratitude. Each of these five things connects to the others. If you have a connection with a higher source of power, you will love; you will have integrity; you will hope for a better life. If you hope for a better life, you will start to love, have integrity, and believe in something more than yourself. This is the only way to find joy. Learn to nurture these qualities and you will start building your units of joy.

Alyson Carson is a small business coach who specializes in helping small business owners attain holistic wealth to create more joy in their lives. She helps them thrive physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually as they obtain their monetary wealth. If you would like help implementing these ideas, feel free to contact her. She can be reached at alyson@life-balance-institute.com. Her website is www.life-balance-institute.com.

Share This

Your Comments

Commenting is closed for this article.

Click here to go to Features Archives