Carpe Diem

My friends and I love to complain to one another. It's something we do almost daily. Although this is more so for something to talk about - usually our problems are minuscule, and we know this, we just feel like complaining - the whole thing got me thinking: What makes happiness?

Webster's dictionary online defined happiness as "good fortune, prosperity; a state of well-being and contentment."

I see hordes of people every weekend with drunken grins plastered to their faces as they cling to each other and sway back and forth to the song of the week. Just from watching these people, if I knew nothing about alcohol or American culture, I would point to them and call that happiness.

In reality, however, many people who drink to get drunk are trying to escape, to become someone other than their sober selves for a night, to see the world in a different way for a few hours. This isn't happiness.

Alcohol aside, one of my friends said that she was happiest on her birthday. Another said she was happy with a pint of Ben and Jerry's, and yet another said that it was only possible to be happy when you were in love.

But just like sobering up, birthdays come to an end, guilt lingers at the bottom of the Ben and Jerry's carton and lovers have their first quarrel.

Why is it so hard for us to maintain a constant state of happiness?

I've decided that the answer can be found in the "contentment" part of the definition. Though I think happiness is more than just contentment, when we're happy we're definitely content: We're not yearning for anything more, and we're entirely satisfied with our situation at that moment.

But, at least as Americans, we're coached from youth to never be content with what we have, to always yearn for more, to keep working and to keep trying to improve.

Progress and improvement are vital to our society and have helped us become one of the most powerful countries in the world. Our insatiability has led us to innumerable advancements in many industries and aspects of life.

When it comes to individual people, this insatiability has drastic downsides. Because we're always reaching for more, it hinders our ability to ever just relax and indulge completely in the moment. We're never satisfied, and if we ever think we are, it's almost always short-lived.

For example, one out of every two couples gets divorced today. Some attribute the statistic to the inevitability that two people will change and grow apart after a certain number of years and some to the impossibility of monogamy.

But what if it's that the people just aren't satisfied with each other? They fall in love, settle into a life with a person and are happy for a while. But then that insatiability factor begins to tug at them, their eyes begin to wander, some of the happiness slips away and they're no longer content. They're constantly striving for more, for better.

Our insatiable hunger to have and be the best - when the bar for what signifies the "best" is constantly rising - is, in some ways, ruining us. It's rare for people to sit back for more than a day and just look around them thinking, "Wow, I wouldn't change a thing."

There's nothing wrong with striving to better oneself, but sometimes this constant striving blinds us to the good things that are right in front of us every day, to the lives we already have.

With 2012 quickly approaching and with it the end of the world, shouldn't we enjoy what we have right now, at this moment, while we still can? As Buddha said, "Contentment is the highest wealth." Carpe diem.