Joie de vivre

This blog article contains 926 words, 4163 characters and spaced at 1 line per page. See how i can make it immediately boring for the reader. Why does this happen, why do we make things unappealing; get confused in life and have discussions about i dont know where i lost all those years. The travel i could have made, places i wanted to visit, people i wanted to meet, if only i could have had the time!

First, stories from where i got an inspiration to write about this. I am reading a book "The best things in life" – Thomas Hurka. In the book they discuss about how each of us crave for pleasure from everything that we do and seek happiness. This is sort of like our purpose in life. A section of it talked about how drugs, cigarettes can give you pleasure but the problem is, in the initial stages just a little of it could give you pleasure but later stages you just need to consume more to get that feeling of pleasure. On the other hand in matters concerning passion and not an addiction, lets say you want to be a writer of course in the beginning stages, you may not be that great at it but as you keep pursuing on it the pleasure only keeps increasing and you feel greater and happier about your passion.

Later i happened to watch a TED video by Joan Halifax on how compassion, caring and other qualities which are primarily what makes us human, is sort of not realized till there is some sort of struggle faced by someone close to them (http://www.ted.com/talks/joan_halifax.html). Be it a family member or friend, till a person that you have well known suffers from it, most of us have an attitude to not grieve or mourn. Please dont mistake me, i am not referring to the entirety of the human race but for the most part when we are watching news and see that somalia has starvation issues, earthquake in japan, people killed in wars, riots etc; we take the news and can only think about the details of the news rather not about the emotional pain and suffering that people are going through. It felt as long it doesnt happen in my backyard, don't bother. Why is this a problem, you might ask; when you develop a society with future generations thinking along the same line then imagine how each one of us will feel distant from each other in the world.

Although social networking sites like facebook, twitter, google plus have made distances feel closer and closer; i want us to think about how all of us value our real relationships, the ones that matter the most. I have some uncles and aunts who were so good at keeping the family together at an age in the 80s and 90s where there was no Internet, forget about social networking sites. They used to meet us whenever they get a chance and regularly call us and talk to us about our studies and health and so on. Back then i used to feel, this is all some routine but then now they are no more i feel that i miss people like that. They simply used to call and find out if i was well.

Now this ongoing discussions about Americas debt, unemployment, GDP led me further to think about other key issues which is sort of the theme of this blog; What Matters?. I did not know about the king of bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck who when he took office in 1972 at the age of 17  thought that the important measure of a country is not just by measuring GDP but by measuring GNH (Gross National Happiness). He identified some of the problems with whats taken into account with regards to calculating GDP and found that the most important things like involvement in the society, happiness, basically accounting for how people feel with their lives.

Photo Courtesy : Wikipedia

A businessman Chip Conley, a hotel chain owner who thought about what actually counts, implemented this (http://www.ted.com/talks/chip_conley_measuring_what_makes_life_worthwhile.html). He studied about Abraham Maslows hierarchy of needs which clearly talks about how human motivation is shaped. Its in the form of a pyramid with the fundamental being physiological and the top most being self-actualization. Upon interpreting this basics nature of human beings, chip conley devised his own pyramid for business by channeling Maslow into what he calls transformational pyramids including metrics to count employee sense of meaning and belonging in the company and the customer’s sense of connection. He started asking employees and customer’s questions pertinent to his business and due to which the employee felt a better connecting with the company and the customer loyalty increased. How can we make leaders measure the intangible things in life?

Can we measure how much we love somebody, what it feels when we lose a person who is close to us, how much happiness we feel when we work for something and get it. So when asked to the bhutanese about how do you create this form of happiness? they replied bhutan is a place which provides a habitat for happiness by asking people questions about how they feel about how their days are spent. Basically they believe in the principle proclaimed by Rabbi Hyman, Happiness is not having what you want but wanting what you have.

Photo Coutesy: http://andreebelle.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/gross-national-happiness/

So lets all create a habitat of happiness in whatever we do, wherever we work and how much ever we earn. Lets count what matters.