Happiness is . . . . .

A few decades ago, life & work was so much simpler then. Cost of living was lower and our salary was in retrospect, also much less. Management objectives were based on achieving them on a normal 8 hour day.

Back then you were considered a dedicated employee then when you gave your employer a highly productive eight or nine hour day. Give up a lunch hour once a week; come in on a Saturday once every few months and you were on a fast track to the top.

Through the years we strive harder and our pay scale rose to ever greater heights. Suddenly we realized our earnings is now many times our original pay and correspondingly work life seems to get a lot more complicated.

Nowadays, management objectives are based on achieving them in a 24 hr day. As such, employees are expected to arrive before 8:00 A.M. (start of working hour) work through lunch and even through dinner. On those rare occasions when the employee needs to leave by 6:00 P.M., he even feels compelled to apologize for having to "skip out early" and only working "half day".

Then there's personal time or what's left of it anyway. Tethered by technology and the new "ever available" work ethic, we are expected to pick up voice and email messages

from home or outside, relinquish our time on the weekends and be available during vacations.

Such is the working life in one of those high-stress, need-it-yesterday type jobs (Sound familiar?). In the above description, career advancement isn't even on the agenda.

Instead, we are just trying to stay afloat in the rising workflow rapids. Even the poor losers in our team are sacrificing as much amount of their time, if not more.

That's how far we have progressed from those good old days in a mere decade or so. Though their salary is great, we see a high proportion of unhappy people. Thus as one

graduate puts it when asked what job he would like: "A career in my field in the science and technology where I can make a lot of many and hope I won't hate it too much".

Work is good. It's one of the most important ways in which we can help the world, add value to others, and get fulfillment in life. We should not shy away from it. We can even

use work to be happy. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

No one in his or her right mind sets out to be miserably well off. Quite the contrary according to prevailing paradigm. Money, with all the goods and services it can buy, is

precisely what it takes to achieve that elusive state of "happiness." But in all the earning and spending, are we really any happier?

Not according to the recent surveys conducted by Dominguez and Robin (authors of Your Money or Your Life). If we believe their figures, there is no correlation between income

and happiness. In fact, people in the United States and Canada earning between $0 - 1,000 a month reported being slightly happier than those whose monthly income exceeded

$4,000. In a recent survey by Gallup, eight of the ten top happiest places across the globe were developing nations in South America, with Panama in the number one spot. The

least happy nation in the survey, by the way, was Singapore, the world's fifth richest nation in terms of per capita wealth.

Even though we own more than our parent's generation, the percentage of people describing themselves as "very happy" has actually declined. This is despite our higher incomes and material things at our disposal. “Affluenza” is the term used for having "Income that far exceeded Level of Bliss". Its symptoms are typically :
1) a bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Jones
2) An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the “American Dream”

But what if we could reverse the equation ? What if we could trade money for happiness ? Would we ? Should we ?

In this age of materialism, the thought of earning less money is quite scary. This is why people stayed in their own high stress jobs for as long as we have done. But for those who are struck with hypertension, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc., one of the saddest things that can happen in their pursuit of wealth can be the realization that there could be no more recovery from such health conditions. To these people, the worse would be to have a stress related event and die a few months or so before retirement.

The choice of course depends on each of us. My recommendation to avoid misery :
1) Make health as the highest priority of all your goals - without a healthy body, we can never achieve any of our other goals in life
2) Find a line of work that you love - do not wait twenty or so years in your working life only to look back at your life and find you have been miserable
3) Realize that happiness is a state that depends more on our perception of our situation - You will be able perform better which in turn gives you more fulfillment and happiness
4) Take control of your own life - make sure you are conscious of the consequences of your decisions to allocate your working time. It should your conscious decision to sacrifice your family time, personal growth / improvement time, and time for other opportunities. It is a decision considering be able to meet your bosses' expectations

As it is said "Wealth is the slave of a wise man and the master of fools"

Above were excerpts from "Early to Rise" and "Daily Health Tip" magazines that I believe you would find interesting.