The Pursuit of Happiness – the Irony in Achieving One’s Goals!

An unsaid wish – I wanna go back to the time when“getting high” meant “on a swing”. When “drinking” meant “mango juice”. When“Dad” was the only “hero”, when “love” was “mom’s hug”.When “Dad’s shoulder” was “the highest place on earth”. When you’re “worst enemies “were “your siblings”. When the only thing that could “hurt” were “bruised knees”, when the only things “broken” were your“toys” and when “good byes” only meant “till tomorrow”.-AnonymousIn today’s information age thanks to the rampant development in technology, we are seeing unprecedented changes in our everyday life. Whether its career choices, the academic courses we pursue, how we connect with friends and family or even how we search for potential partners. Today most of us have the freedom to choose from the smallest things like the food we want to eat to the person we want to spend our lives with. This growing freedom of choice coupled with the free flow of information via internet, media and social networks, drive individuals to excel and achieve success at an accelerated pace. With the growing number of expectations to fulfil, aspirations to accomplish, and the need to prove one-self, our world predominately centers our needs, and our desires. Today’s generation is mostly consumed by its quest for achieving success, as soon as possible. Thanks to plethora of opportunities, excellent salaries and the ageof EMIs, where whatever you dream you can get now, our metrics for success centers around our material comforts or the recognition for power. Happiness and wellbeing for us is a “someday somewhere phenomena” usually linked to achieving our big goals. We forget that well being and happiness is actually a state of being and is not linked necessary to the goals we pursue. One of the biggest things we could do to break this cycle is to actually take a pause, to evaluate the pros and cons of our relentless pursuit and actually see if it’s really worth it  We go about life with a pair of blinders missing out on everything life throws at us our friends, family, the air we breathe, the birds on the tree, the love around us! The scary part is when we do achieve what we set out too, and get it, we are still not happy since the goal post has changed. So most of our lives just go in chasing different goal posts – the question for you is at what cost??