Profound and Complete Happiness: A Fascinating Way

Abhishek Verma
5 min readNov 19, 2019

Being happy all the time is a fool’s paradise idea. Let’s clear this up with Sigmund Freud’s golden words on happiness:

Strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.

What Freud points out is the dichotomy of every experience and emotion you have. We live in a mirror world where everything has an contrasting aspect of it. You can’t know what is feeling cold if you haven’t felt hot? Or let this quote by J.S. Foer do the work for me.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

It’s simple and yet, we against all reason tend to chase after happiness. But, is it about the chase or being content.

Let’s break it up into some scientific jargon, so, we get a bird eye’s view on this one.

Hedonia and Eudaimonia are the two aspects of Happiness.

Hedonia is pleasure and momentary well-being. Simply, put all those little happy moments right from the kiss on her lips to the amazing roller-coaster ride you had all come together to form the essence of hedonia. Hedonia is easy to get, watch a funny video for example. Whatever

Eudaimonia is living a meaningful life and flourishing in it. Mahatma Gandhi captures the essence of this word properly in his quote:

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Its hard to achieve that balance and we all keep pursuing that balance. We tend to forget while chasing butterflies, you forget the kisses of nature. We are so focused on the goal that trying to achieve it brings stress to us, even though that end goal is happiness (the opposite of it).

Now, that we have broken happiness, oops!, into two aspects. What can be a good plan to get everlasting happiness?