Half-empty, half-full glass

March 30, 2024

What is the meaning of life? My take is that life is about learning how to be happy sustainably. Not about being happy, necessarily, but learning how to be. In learning how to be happy, that doesn’t mean to be happy all the time, because things happen. Happiness is also a metric that is measured differently depending on the person. Like personally, I really really hate bugs, but someone else could derive their happiness from studying bugs their whole life! The fact that we all have our passions and hobbies is so cool.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s head back to the definition. I haven’t explained “sustainably,” yet it is a crucial part of the definition. There are many ways one can be happy in a way that is disingenuine or that masks a root cause of unhappiness, rendering the happiness temporary. However, the boundary between what is sustainable versus what is unsustainable is a gray area too. Happiness naturally waxes and wanes, so is there ever sustained happiness? How long does happiness have to last for a certain technique to be deemed “sustainable”?

I think the metric of what is sustainable also depends on the person. For me, sustainability is also about its repeatability and its after-effects, along with whether the overall action results in a net positive. We shouldn’t feel taxed in the long-term to make up for the short-term either, and of course we shouldn’t create our happiness at the cost of others. Hence, I like to look at life through a half-full glass. We know so little about each other’s lives and intentions, so it doesn’t make sense to impose a bias behind someone’s actions.

Of course, there are times when this half-full glass view of life was problematic. It is slightly reminiscent of toxic positivity. Indeed, there have been times when I looked past people who… well, may not have had the best intentions. This is when I kinda depend on my friends to see the situation at face value. An example of this is not of a person, but of an unscheduled drill during finals week around two years ago: when everyone else was panicking, I assumed that there was a drill and tried to convince others that this was the case. At the time, no one knew whether the drill was real, but I was living peacefully, which in retrospect, was naive.

Otherwise, seeing life through a half-full glass has worked pretty well. I like to think that when we look around, everyone and everything is a reflection of ourselves. People will mirror your energy, which is why some people say that “life is what you make it to be.” We shape the people who are around us, and we mimic the people who are around us.

Happiness is a choice we can make, and we all have it in us to push through and make that choice, no matter how hard it may be.

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