Did you know that not everyone thinks happiness is a good thing?

If you had to define happiness with just one word, what would it be? Love? Cheers? Money? Family? Friends? The truth is that happiness is an abstract subject, and its best definition always depends on one's personal experience. Generally speaking, everyone wants to be happy, right? Well ... Maybe not so much.

Studying happiness should not be the simplest thing in the world, and some recent research has suggested that it is not so obvious that everyone wants to be happy. In fact, it seems that happiness is more about a cultural issue than something inherent in the human condition.

It may seem strange to think this way, but in some parts of the world people run away from happiness, and, believe it or not, you may well know the reason for that - you just might not realize it yet.

Who wants to be happy?

In some cultures, happiness is interpreted in other ways. You must be used to the idea that a happy person is one who feels good mentally and physically, right? In some Asian regions, happiness is not interpreted that way - being happy is sometimes seen as inappropriate, and in Japan, for example, happiness does not seem to have the same value as it does for us. It is nothing very important.

Research by scientists at Wellington University looked at the different ways people view happiness and how important each culture attaches to it. For us who are used to seeing happiness as a good thing and a kind of life goal, the results of this study are truly amazing.

The researchers explored two basic types of happiness: that which we feel when we are promoted at work, for example, is quite different from what we feel when we come home and play with the family dog. These two situations of joy were used to illustrate the idea of ​​self-centered happiness in the case of employment and happiness together in the case of the dog. At this point, cultural differences have a really significant influence.

Bad omen

For most Easterners, happiness is seen as a kind of warning of bad omen. Anyone too happy, celebrating too much, or having too much fun would be, for them, almost asking for something very bad to happen next. For these people, happiness is always an earlier stage of something with serious unfolding.

While this belief is really strong in Eastern cultures, researchers have found that many Westerners are familiar with the idea that too much happiness bodes for some bad event. You may have even heard your grandmother say that a lot of laughter always ends in crying or something.

In fact, we care about happiness so much that we turn our idea of ​​it into anxiety; As we know, this is not a very positive thing. Do we carry out Eastern prophecy without even realizing it? In this sense, it is clear that there is a very direct relationship between happiness and how safe a person feels with his own life.

Philosophies of Spirituality

This theory of aversion to happiness has much to do with Eastern religious and spiritual beliefs. In this sense, because they believe in the balance of everything, moments of extreme happiness precede bad moments for the sake of stabilization, balancing. It is basically as if there were a scale, one of the oldest with two balancing surfaces, where on one side was happiness and on the other the opposite of it.

In Korea, many people believe that a person happy in the present will have a sad future. In Iran, there is even a saying that “laughing out loud wakes up sadness, ” and it doesn't take much textual interpretation to understand what Iranians think about it.

In other regions, however, the belief is that being happy is synonymous with being corrupt - some Islamic groups believe that happiness is something we should avoid because it comes from God and not from ephemeral and vulgar things on our planet. In fact, this is a question that really depends on one's culture and belief.

And for you, what is the maximum of happiness? Comment on the Mega Curious Forum