Essentials

"Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."
Joseph Addison

We all want to be happy yet happiness often eludes us. The website of the National Institute of Mental Health tells us that depression is the leading cause of disability among Americans between the ages of 15 and 44. Statistics also show that 6.7% of Americans are affected by Major Depression, and 9.5% have a depressive disorder, in any particular calendar year. That's a lot of unhappy people.

In order to be happy we need to have something to do. But not just anything, our actions must be meaningful to us. That is, they must be directed to a goal that is important and significant to us. So many of us are on a treadmill because we don't have any well defined goals that are important enough to us for us to want to work consistently towards them. We often sit and wish for things, but we were meant to take action towards them too.

In order to be happy we must have something to love. We must care about something other than ourselves. When we are focused on someone else or something else and how to eliminate their problems, our own problems tend to vanish away too. When we love, we are grateful; and this makes us feel more like our other needs will be taken care of somehow, by the same entity that brought this wonderful thing (or person) into our life in order to enrich us.

In order to be happy we must have something to hope for. We can't be happy unless we expect good things to happen in the future. We must be able to visualize things going well, even if they are not going well around us right now. We must have hope to create enough motivation to keep taking action to create the life we that we have discovered that we love.

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