A friend killed herself for she’s unhappy not getting the attention from her parents. Another one ruined a family to prove that getting everything he wants marks a strong personality as a source of happiness.

Double Happiness Calligraphy

Hedonism, whether quantitative: the value of a pleasure to be its intensity multiplied by its duration, or qualitative: higher quality pleasure is better than lower quality pleasure (Simpler pleasures do not see other aspects of life and the least can do is simply indulge in their simple pleasures. The more elaborate beings tend to spend more thought on other matters and hence lessen the time for simple pleasure), is so addictive and it consumes most of our existence.

Happiness is just a state of mind.

In a report by Dan Gilbert -Harvard professor of Psychology and author of the bestseller, Stumbling on Happiness, concluded that we make ourselves happy by imagining that we are happy. So getting what we want doesn’t actually have much to do with feeling happy.

In fact, in his study, he concluded that happiness may be much simpler contrary to popular beliefs:

• that getting what we want in life has everything to do with happiness.
• that accomplishing worthwhile things, or obtaining desirable material possessions will make us happy.
• that multiple choices create contentment.

And synthetic happiness, a psychological immune system,  is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. It helps us change the views of the world so we can feel better about the world we are into.

“Imagination is the poor man’s wormhole. We can’t do what we’d really like to do — namely, travel through time, pay a visit to our future selves, and see how happy those selves are­ — and so we imagine the future instead of actually going there. But if we cannot travel in the dimension of time, we can travel in the dimensions of space, and the chances are pretty good that somewhere in those other three dimensions there is another human being who is actually experiencing the event that we are merely thinking about.”

An insight in answering the question What Really Makes Us Happy? through research somehow gives a dopamine-induced imagination and an insulin-triggered will to make life less painful by creating something as catharsis (recycle trash, ponder on ideas, give other perspective on art or quotation, etc foe example).

Collective thoughts suggests some pointers on how to trigger a creative state of mind.