This is a question not easy to answer. We are used to place this happiness into so many people and things that we might forget one essential thing: we are responsible for our own happiness. But what does this mean?

   In my opinion, this means that we shouldn’t wait for someone else to make us happy. Yes, we can be happy with someone else, but this doesn’t mean that whenever we’re sad, we should wait for that someone or something to make us happy. When we’re sad, it’s easy to say that we need that thing/situation/place/person for us to be happy, but is that how things should be? If so, it means that we are unable to be happy by ourselves? “Blaming” something/someone else for our own happiness is like waiting for someone to open for us an umbrella in a rainy day. Yes, there might be someone that does it, but if there isn’t, does that mean that we can’t open one by ourselves? We should be able to open the umbrella for ourselves and after that we can open one for someone else or we can take someone under our umbrella.

   I think that there are some “advantages” people take when it comes to this. Not having someone or something gives people a reason to be sad and they also pass the blame for their own sadness to someone else. Also, people think that being sad draws attention and that attention is interpreted as an act of carrying and that act of carrying is transformed into a “happiness pill”. The thought that someone might care about us gives a nice feeling, but the problem here is that once that someone’s attention disappears, the “happiness” disappears too and we go back to being sad and the circle repeats.

   Also, not having enough money/cars/clothes/watches/friends etc. are used as reasons to be sad in the hope that it will draw some attention and it also spares us for not trying to do things, so being sad might also be a reason for procrastination.

   There are situations where we get sad when we lose someone (like a member of our family) and that’s normal. It doesn’t mean that our happiness depends of that person. It means that we care about that person and we’re sad for losing him/her. The problem appears when we’re waiting for someone to make us happy. If we were happy before meeting that person, it’s normal for us to be sad if we lose him/her and after some time we’ll be able to be happy again, but if we were waiting for someone to make us happy, losing that person would be devastating and we’ll be sad until we’ll find for someone else to make us happy and so on.

   Not being able to be happy by ourselves will create an addiction to someone and our behavior to make that person happy will have a “return” intention. This means that we’ll do nice things so the other one does nice things for us and if they don’t, we get upset and we’ll start blaming the other one that he/she doesn’t care about us the way we do about them (we “proved” it with our nice behavior). This blaming appears because if the other one doesn’t do nice things and we interpret it as not caring behavior which triggers our fear of losing that person who’s our “happiness dealer”.

   All this “happiness” might be a game we created because we like to blame the others for our own suffering and because this is easy to do. It’s easy to see the negative side of everything. It’s hard to find the good in everything. It’s hard to switch your view away from the pain. It’s hard to go up and go forward if you got knocked down. It’s hard to find reasons to be happy in your actual state. It’s easier to look at the others and want what they have thinking that we’ll be happy when we’ll be having those things, but never doing anything to get those things and the main reason for this is that it’s not motivating enough to put on the effort. Let’s better stay sad because we don’t have those things, right?

   I prefer the hard part. What about you?