While for Muslims, a good and fulfilled life means living a life dedicated to “Allah”. Al-Gahazali published the “Alchemy of happiness”, a book of spiritual instructions which is very popular in the Muslim world, it is centred on how to be happy worshiping “ALLAH”
A student of philosophy would say a happy man is a person who is currently pleased with his or herself at that certain point in time.
The biological aspect of happiness is one held by all men of science, an American happiness researcher and author of “The How of Happiness”, Sonja Lyubermirsky once said that 50% of a human beings happiness levels are predetermined by his or her genes, with another 40% being influenced by the persons current state of mind while the remaining 10% is affected by the persons external state of mind.
Happiness & Science
The belief that money, weather or a person’s level of education does not have the supposed effect on our state of happiness is one held by many scientists.
In an presentation hosted by TED talks in 2004 Psychologist Martin Seligman described emotions like depression as being fuzzy concepts before which, he had created the concept of PERMA aimed at explaining factors which affect happiness.
PERMA being an acronym he created to serve this purpose means Pleasure, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishments. For Seligman, he believed that humans were truly happy when they had achieved all the factors of PERMA.
Pleasure either from eating food or doing things they liked, were engaged, meaning when they were enveloped in a certain activity they were in love with, to quote the one time world best footballer Ronaldinho “I’m only happy when I have the ball at my feet” to this particular footballer he truly enjoys playing football and as a result he feels happy whenever he engages himself in the game, different people have different activities which they love to engage themselves in to gain happiness.
Relationships in the sense of how we relate with others around us as well as how they relate with us, in his TED talks seminar Seligman made note that one major difference in extremely happy people and regular people was that “extremely happy people were extremely sociable”(TED talks Feb 2004) . Meaning (finding purpose in what we do), based on how we see ourselves, for some they might feel that their lives are part of some higher calling, this gives them a sense of meaning in their lives and finally accomplishments.
These five factors form the backbone of this research work and as a result are they are explained extensively in the course of this project.
Factors of happiness
- Engagement
Although Engagement comes second in Martins concept, in my opinion I see engagement as being the most important of the 5. Being engaged as defined by Martin means to have a flow in life, to be able to gladly participate in meaningful and challenging activity, for some it could be in their job while for others it could be religiously. In my own opinion you need to be able to find a means of engaging yourself before you can even think of pursuing happiness.
- Meaning
Just as being engaged is important, finding a meaning is also important and as such it is second in my ranking. Meaning differs from person to person and once you have found a means in which to engage yourself, you then need to find a meaning in what you are doing. History has shown that all footballers who have won the “Footballer of the year” award are those who have found at why they play the sport; players such as Lionel Messi and Ronaldinho are always seen smiling when they have the ball at their feet. Same can be said about Religious workers, who have found meaning in fate and believing in an afterlife, that is why many polls have shown religious people to be happy than non-religious people, although differences in weak believers and extremists also affects this concept.
- Accomplishment
Accomplishment isn’t a factor of wealth; ironically it is the other way around. Wealth is a factor of accomplishment. To be accomplished means to have attained the personal goals which you set for yourself, things like wealth, desire and intelligence affect accomplishments. To desire something, means to crave something, how much you desire a particular thing largely influences how hard you are willing to work for it, most teenage girls want to have a nice beach body for summer but not all of them are ready to go to the gym to work for that body. The difference in them is that the ones which go to the gym are those who really desire that beach body to the extent that ready to work for it. Personally for me I desire to be a footballer that is why I try to train as well as play football regularly.
- Relationships
Relationships are also important in the pursuit of happiness, Marcel Proust once said “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” This can be interpreted to mean that the people around us can also influence our state of happiness, on this aspect psychologists believe extroverts to be happier than introverts because of the quantity of friends extroverts have when compared to that of introverts. Although introverts might have the advantage when it comes to quality of friends.
- Pleasure
Pleasure being the first “happy factor” mentioned by the psychologist can be defined as “The state or feeling of being pleased or gratified” (The free dictionary.com), meaning that our pleasure levels change depending on the state we are in. Martin used the example of a man eating French vanilla ice cream to further explain pleasure, according to him although the first taste is special; by the tenth spoonful the taste is no more unique. This can be applied to our everyday lives, some people value a life of pleasure as a means of being happy but the draw back off s life of pleasure is the effect are short lived, meaning the person finds himself moving from one pleasantry to another in order to be happy. An example could be a husband who enjoys having affairs outside his marriage.
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