Category: Happiness
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Life without Work is Impossible
When I had just entered secondary school, I visited a book exhibition with my father in my hometown. I remember the English books section was not the biggest in this regional books-focused event. I picked the usual suspects on science, universe and environment, which I used to love as a school kid. My dad, however,…
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Learning the skill of happiness
Fortunately today there is a lot of good research available on the topic of happiness. By relying on philosophers’ careful thinking and using the methods of science, we can have better answers to questions that have vexed humanity for millennia and these answers only get more accurate and precise over time. One such enlightening reasearch…
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Hormones of Happiness
If there is one aspiration that unites all humans, it is happiness. Every person, irrespective of their gender, race, religion, education, standard of living, status, nationality – wants to be happy. And happiness is the sum total of how one feels about oneself, others and world in general. Since happiness is felt, it rides on…
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The meaning of finding meaning in life.
Many people drift aimlessly through life or keep changing their goals, running around chasing whatever they choose to call happiness. While some others live the life that their parents or their religion/caste/creed/cult or spouses have in mind for them. One finds ultimate fulfilment in life when one has a deep sense of living meaningfully. Before…
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Live One Life. Live with Integrity
There are countless ways to live life: some of us believe in living for the day, some want to make the best of the day, some want to live for an afterlife, some want to live many lives in the same one and so on. There is no one to how many schools of life…
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How we have become a Global Organism
In the science fiction of the 1920s, it was imagined that the humans of the future grow bigger and bigger brains to process more and more information and take more and more complex decisions and problem-solving. What actually happened was quite unforeseen. Instead of growing our brains, we started building a gigantic digital nervous system…
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Epicurus’s Happiness Hack
I think Epicurus is the most misunderstood of all philosophers. The pleasure principle propounded by him is largely misinterpreted and the wrong ideas have fuelled an entire generation of ‘Carpe Diem’ and ‘Wine, Dine & Be Merry- for there is no tomorrow’ generation. I want to make this post super simple and so I am…
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Trade-offs in Life: We can’t have it all
It seems many of us wish to have it all in life. Each of us has a live, ever-updating and growing list of needs, wants and desires. And we want them by making no compromises and having no regrets. We learn quite late in life that there is a tradeoff for everything in life. Most…
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Relating Wellbeing and Flourishing to Moksha, the Final Pursuit
I was reading this book called ‘Flourish’ by Martin Seligman who is considered the father of positive psychology and was relating this concept to Purusharthas of Vedas, and that is when I had this insight. So I thought of sharing it on the blog. I have talked about the four pursuits of time a few…
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What makes a good life or a life good enough?
How much is really enough? Can we measure life simply by accumulated wealth? Can there be ‘good enough’ good in our life? Edward Skidelsky and Robert Skidelsky attempted to answer these questions in their 2012 book How Much is Enough: Money and the Good Life. They proposed that “Good Life consists in realizing the “basic goods”…
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Happiness needs to be pursued, not simply desired
In the ancient Indian Vedic tradition, happiness is described as ‘purushartha’ meaning ‘pursuit’, something we need to plan, budget and work for rather than something that is obtained by wishing for it. The Vedic tradition talks of four Purusharthas or Pursuits (they sound similar): Kama (Pleasure or simply Fun), Artha (Security), Dharma (Values) and Moksha…
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The Four types of luck
I mentioned in a previous blog post that there are three key ingredients to success: Hard work, Timing and Luck. Here I would like to flesh out the topic of luck. It is a commonly held belief that luck is something that is outside our sphere of influence and hence we cannot control it. This…
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The Four Kinds of Friends We All Need
Show me who your friends are and I will show you what you are. Vladimir Lenin A friend is a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection and it is typically one exclusive of sexual or direct family relations. Friends come in all shapes, sizes and colours. Friends are not just people…
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12 Money lessons for my daughter
Most of us adults believe that money is a harsh reality of life. But the fact is that reality is neither harsh nor benign. It simply is a fact of life. It is our lack of objectivity that makes it look harsh or otherwise. The sooner we have this objectivity in life, the better are…
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Makara Sankranti: The Sun Festival of India
This is the first festival of the year and normally occurs on Jan 14th or 15th. This year it occurs on Jan 14. Wrote this brief post to describe the festival.
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‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling
Sharing one of my all time favourite poems, ‘If’ as weekend inspiration. The poem is full of inspiration, motivation, maxims for living well and is a blueprint for personal integrity, behaviour and self-development.
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Use money to find freedom, not bondage
If I have to pass on only one financial advise to my daughter it would be to never get into debt. In borrowing for the present pleasure, we rob ourselves of the future peace and happiness. With the growth of banking and financial institutions, living with debt has become the norm today. To pay EMIs…
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Adopting an attitude of Dharma for happy and harmonious living
In simple terms, dharma is the ‘right thing’ to do at any point in time under any given circumstance. It’s an attitude. Dharma itself is aligned and harmonious with the laws of nature- at a physical, psychological and social level. Of course one can debate endlessly about what is right under a given circumstance but…
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