The Responsibility of Happiness.

Happiness is good.

Take a moment with that, swill it around in your brain and get the full flavor of it.

That's a number of things in one statement, not all of which I will probably get to. Happiness is good, it feels good, is it the essence of feeling good? I don't think so, but what it is happens to be the awareness of feeling good. That's really something wonderful.

Feeling good and happy is great, it is absolutely and completely enough. Just that is enough. What I want is simply more of that, and so when someone feels it, I approve. I also don't think that there are many cases where people feel good and happy at the expense of someone else's misery. It happens sometimes, and then decisions become complicated. More often people think they will be happier if they do stuff that results in others' misery, and are wrong. As a rule of thumb, try to be happy and don't worry about it.

But what I want to talk about today, as a matter of responsibility, is the matter of your own happiness. Your own happiness is probably of some importance for yourself, although you probably don't actually spend enough time and energy on it. Generally people have ambition, or success, or achievement, or fear, or responsibility as equally important goals. What you may not know is how important your happiness is to the happiness of other people. Happiness is something that is transmitted from one person to another. Your happiness directly effects the happiness of other people. If you are committed to your own happiness, and so are your friends, then a feedback loop of happiness is created.

From the all-knowing Wikipedia:

Human relationships are consistently found to be the most important correlation with human happiness.

A widely-publicized study from 2008 in the British Medical Journal reported that happiness in social networks may spread from person to person.^[17] Researchers followed nearly 5000 individuals for 20 years in the long-standing Framingham Heart Study and found clusters of happiness and unhappiness that spread up to 3 degrees of separation on average. Happiness tended to spread through close relationships like friends, siblings, spouses, and next-door neighbors, and the researchers reported that happiness spread more consistently than unhappiness through the network. Moreover, the structure of the social network appeared to have an impact on happiness, as people who were very central (with many friends and friends of friends) were significantly more likely to be happy than those on the periphery of the network. Overall, the results suggest that happiness might spread through a population like a virus.^[18][19]

This means that if you care about those around you, and I think you do, you have a duty and responsibility to try to get yourself happy. If you don't, you are causing misery and happiness to those around you, so cut that out right away.

I would like to thank the Jim and Leslie-Ann for their recent visit, as they took this duty seriously with fine results.

This post was produced while I feel a deep sense of love and humor for my position in the world, surrounded by beauty, and fabulously optimistic about the future. Because of my basic make-up, my bio-chemistry, I have times of dark horror, and times of splendid Wonder. I tend to talk about the dark times more than the Wonder, but that isn't because the times of Wonder aren't as significant, but rather that I'm too busy experiencing them. I truly wish you could feel this, perhaps you do, and that is wonderful. At least one of the Emilys understands.