In my original blog posting regarding the definition of happiness, I asserted that a person is happy because they accomplish some specific goal -- a person must want to be happy; they invest time and energy into meeting some predetermined objective. After the fact, I considered how happiness can also be interpreted as contentment. I discovered that a person can experience contentment without necessarily being complacent, so then I challenged myself to consider whether or not a person not aiming to meet a specific goal can be happy. I think so.

I believe that my reasoning stemmed from considerations of how self-evaluation and self-esteem might play a role in happiness. A person could set out to meet an objective, succeed, and then lack the sense of fulfillment that happiness implies. What then? Perhaps this reasoning also accounts for why Americans constantly are chasing after the newest trend, the highest paying job, or the biggest TV set, never to obtain authentic happiness. Maybe, competition and the belief that reaching goals equates to happiness is in fact preventing many from experiencing it. I asked myself: what is the end goal? When should a person stop and consider themselves finished? When they have achieved perfection? What does that mean and is perfection honestly attainable??

Secondly, I considered a hypothetical scenario: If I set out to be successful in a specific area of study, and it turns out that I am not cut out for a job in that field, or maybe I am not as interested in a particular field the way that I thought that I would be, will I then not achieve happiness in my career? I realized that time might also play a role in determining happiness that I had not previously addressed in my definition of happiness. Perhaps there is some further distinguishment that I need to make for myself in determining the separation of short term and long term happiness, as well as how happiness might be perceived in many different lights depending on the reference point of reflection – I had, after all, stated that happiness was an emotion experienced after a certain point. Maybe, happiness is a collection of varying emotional responses, and the point of reference helps to dictate the psychological response to those emotions after the fact, after further mental scaffolding is established as more memories and understanding is established within an individual.