Sorry if I misled anyone to believe this topic was film related. It's not.
This thread is about a topic that has concerned philosophers, religious figures, emotional teenagers and most of the human race at some point in their lives, throughout history. I also have had an interest in this recently.
This thread is about how we can live a good life. More specifically, how we can attain happiness.
The flow of my thoughts go something like this and these are the initial questions I wish to discuss in this thread.
What do I want out of life?
Without exception, in the case of human beings at least, the answer is happiness. That may be achieved through many other factors but that’s the overall goal we all have.
The next logical question is:
how do I achieve happiness?
By fulfilling all my needs.
So,
how can I define what my needs are?
I don’t have an answer to this yet. I know that a need, is not the same as a want. For example, I want to be rich. However I don’t honestly believe this is a need that, if fulfilled, would make me happy. Indeed many studies show that past the ability to meet your basic needs more money does not greatly affect happiness. So what process can we all go through to identify what our needs, in order to be happy, are?
Once I have identified my needs, how should I approach them? How can I work on achieving these needs with the best chance of success?
Again I’ll leave this open and with no real comments this time.
Other questions and issues I feel may be relevant, and/or raised at some point are:
Self-hate/Self-love How to achieve this, and how to come to terms with it.
Morals “He who knows what is good will do good” ~ Socrates. Can you be happy if you do not live by your own morals? How important is it to know your own morals in order to be happy?
There maybe others, but I’ll leave others to raise these points.
Here is a link to a blog that helped pave the way for my thinking. I disagree with it on a few points but its still though provoking.
How to be happy | Seldo.Com Blog