If Happiness Is a Choice, Why Can't We Choose it?

Because we don’t understand choice or happiness or both?

Abrar Masum
4 min readSep 13, 2022

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Photo by Catalin Pop on Unsplash

Happiness!! Oh, happiness!! Where are you? Where can we find you? We all seek happiness but don't know where to find it. There is a famous quote that "Happiness is a choice." Then my question is, why are most people not happy? Choosing it shouldn't be that hard, where the ultimate goal of our lives is to be happy and satisfied.

But choosing happiness might be hard sometimes because we must beat our instincts and habits. We might have to change our perspective on what we have learned in our whole life. Most of our textbooks don't teach us how to be happy, and the constant competition around us doesn't teach us not to be satisfied. And dissatisfaction is the killer of happiness.

Making a Good choice is hard

Let's start again with the famous quote that is the main topic of our today's article.

“Happiness is a choice, not a result. Nothing will make you happy until you choose to be happy.” Ralph Marston

What does it mean? Doesn’t a good and expected outcome make us happy? It does. It actually makes us happy. But we have to remember that happiness is temporary. Choice-based happiness is permanent and causes significant changes in our life.

A glass-half-full or half-empty is the perfect example of making a choice. Those who think this is a half-full glass are the optimistic ones. Optimists are definitely happier than the "half-empty" pessimistic ones.

Photo by manu schwendener on Unsplash

Now the ultimate question is … Is optimism a choice? Mostly no. Because we can't change ourselves within 10 seconds, we can do it gradually. The human mind is the most complicated and beautiful thing in the world.

We can change ourselves a little bit daily through our life activities and choices. It's reported that we make around 35,000 remotely conscious decisions every single day. Most of these little decisions are our choices, and these little…

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Abrar Masum

Philosopher || Entrepreneur || Programmer. Contact: mdabrarmasum@gmail.com