I get it, but do I want it? I’m from an age of control. Where survival was purely “hands-on”. Today we have cyber pursuits of happiness. Never thought I’d live to see the day. However, my life’s pursuit is all about balance. Therefore I remain open to new things, new dynamics.
Everything in life is a choice. In this age of technology, we’re supposed to take absolute comfort in the existence of attaining happiness through the cyber world. The “Happier” site states that they’re helping you appreciate life. They’re showing different ways to just appreciate the little things. They’re goal, apparently is to enlighten others to appreciate the little things. I mean after all isn’t that what life is? A collective of “little things”? I don’t believe you need the cyber world for that.
For a fact, ones mindset of today stems from yesterday. It’s a continuous string of experiences of the past and present that constitutes tomorrow. I believe that most of these sites are attempting to reveal to the world how to channel those experiences, good and bad, and transform us into free thinking, stress free accomplishers.
Life is not a game! At the same time we mustn’t take life so seriously. The “Happify” website attempts to scientifically gauge a person’s happiness with games. These games are apparently designed to stimulate ones motivations towards their goals, thereby bringing us back in the “now” of our objectives and with these new perspectives, we continue to reinvent ourselves.
Sounds great! However this entire Cyber Happiness campaign can be an extreme also. This, as with everything, and I emphasize everything, requires balance. The term “get a life” comes to mind when I imagine a person on the computer or mobile device all day every day, looking for happiness in cyberspace exclusively.
It’s like an innate fear of tangible engagement. Tangible engagement is the bottom line isn’t it? All that is to be attained is to be ultimately tangible.
The Hedonometer depicts the variations in good feelings and bad feelings and the frequency of it all, in correlation to good and bad things taking place where these high and low feelings result from. In 2014, events good and bad have occurred and public perception via twitter was gauged and translated into public moods and the varying frequency of them. That is a great science as far as I’m concerned. It’s a great way to gauge public perception or opinions about incidents occurring or recurring. Now this includes holidays. For instance, according to the hedonometer, Christmas day is the highpoint of happiness in 2014. This is anticipated obviously and I can see how that would be, however the same or similar goes for most of the holidays this year. Then there are the deaths of various celebrities this year, which obviously resulted in varying low points on twitter opinions and moods.
It is very easy to get caught up in computed happiness. We mustn’t get caught up in total reliance on any one thing. I said it before and I’ll say it again and again and yet again. It is ALL about balance. It’s that tree of infinite knowledge where the branches and leaves are varying levels and directions of knowledge. Computer generated scales of happiness is really just one angle. We have to be out there, engaging, really FINDING our happy.
