DescentBB

thoughts just meandering, nothin solid, just thoughts of life.

is life all about the pursuit of happiness?

It should be what it's all about.
However, some if not most people are pursuing other things (wealth, drugs, etc..) at the expense of happiness.

I've given this bit careful thought in the past. Happiness is determined by the quality of your social contacts. Period.

Happiness is obviously relative, and progressive, that is it changes as you get older. Tri's probably at a stage where i was as a younger man, however the definition of my happiness has changed for me a hell of a lot over the years.

The Love for my wife and family is my definition of happiness. Being able to spend enough time to appreciate that i think makes me very happy. I don't have much money, but i have a quality of life with my immediate family that is the envy of my of my peers from the UK and around the world.

Whether life itself is all about the persuit of happiness i'd have to say that in real simple terms who would want to be unhappy, so the answer to your question for me is yes.


......as well as a cool Guiness, steak on the grill and a big spliff of course.

I keep my gun warm all night.

life is about love. It just so happens that love tends to increase happiness, when properly undertaken.

Happiness tends to be different things to different people. For some, it is the pusuit of success in some venture; whether it be the stock market or climbing mountains. For others, it may be a good home life with their family. IMHO, I think each person defines happiness in their own way. I'm pretty happy making things go *kaBOOoom* on my computer screen, building something, or tinkering with my car. But real happiness to me is having a great relationship with my GF (soon to be wife), and hopefully a great and successful family life. I guess that would be a lot of loving relationships .

If you look at the question literally, more specifically the pursuit of happiness, it answers itself. If you are in pursuit of something, it (IMO) implies that you never quite get it. But a well known addage says that it isn't the getting to the destination that's important, it's the journey there. That's spot on. If you give someone everything, they tend to be happy for a short while and then there's nothing left to aquire, nothing to work for, nothing new and interesting, and then they are no longer happy. So, I guess it literally is the pursuit of happiness that makes people happy.

Another thought pops into my head: Lothar: If love is improperly undertaken, is it still love? Just a thought that made me go, "hmmmmmm..."

Happiness is being content with what you own, where you live an who you love.

To me its a little privacy and a bottle of jergens lotion

Ack!

ROFL!

Life is all about wondering what life is all about.

Lothar wrote:It just so happens that love tends to increase happiness, when properly undertaken.

please define "properly undertaken".
KTHANXBYE

life is about the beatles

but i agree with lothar. except he doesn't love me, so he must be a pretty miserable guy

Ympakt wrote:If love is improperly undertaken, is it still love?

No. Saying "love... properly undertaken" was redundant, but done for emphasis. The point of that is that there are many things which are called "love", but some of them don't qualify.

I'm not interested in writing an essay about love at this very moment. The short answer is, love is an act of will, placing someone else above yourself. How exactly that plays out is a subject for a book, or possibly one of my wife's posts.

Beo wrote:i agree with lothar. except he doesn't love me

Who says? I don't always *like* you, and I don't always *agree* with you, but that's not the same thing. [insert obligatory "yes I saw your smilie" smilie here.]

To live is to suffer and die.

That is if you look at your birth in this material world as life. The Buddha taught that life as we experience it in this world lacks essential existence. When we die we have an opportunity to allow our "soul", for want of a better term, to become one with true existence.
While we are in this world we have an opportunity to focus on the postive emotions such as compassion and deny the destructive emotions such as envy. You cannot avoid suffering and death but by focusing on the postive emotions you can experience contentment and joy and you will be happy.

buddhism... oh sweet reality. so ancient, so real.

you are in love with the feeling not the person (or new jill scott cd), per se. just as you cry for yourself, and your sense of loss not the person who died... they are gone and relieved.

No, Life is all about Pain, Pain, and more pain.

Life is all about having someone else clean your toilet.
Love is when they do it for free.

PERSONALLY...I think life (as we humans know it)should be about the constant pursuit of knowledge...think about it,without the perpetual influx of new information, be it whatever, the process of evolution would eventually come to a grinding halt leaving us in a state of absolute decay.It just so happens that although we are smarter than we have ever been, we seem to be content to rest on unfounded laurels. What has happened as technology spurs us onward is that essential needs such as the pursuit of knowledge have been put on the "back burner" in favor of more popular, enjoyable pursuits such as love and material possesions, happiness, etc. Have we fallen victim to our own selfish inner desires to please ourselves and so-called "loved ones" above the betterment of mankind as a whole? This growing trend to "look out for no.1" is not a new idea at this point in time but if we hearken back to ,say, the days when we were mere cave dwellers you can rest assured that then the sense of community and the advancement of it was the only thing that really mattered. Have we grown so advanced and populous that we have forgotten the fundamentals that got us here in the first place? This writer believes so.