I think I’m in some sort of mid-life crisis right now.. Recently I tend to wonder about things like purpose of living, acheiving goals in life, what I want to do when I retire,.. you know, those existential questions that pop-up when you reach that certain point in life. I wonder where all those 8-hour gaming marathon habits of mine went? The last game I played was Sudoku.

A Purpose in Life

I like to read, but I seldom read a book from cover to cover anymore. My daily reading consists mostly of surfing news sites. So I stumbled upon this article on the web that talks about what constitutes happiness among the population. The gist of the article was, although money does not always equal happiness, a person needs to have a minimum amount of money in order to be happy.

Once that threshold is reached, happiness can depend on any factor you can think of.. take your pick. My wife told me how Germans work and work, and they always look forward to their next vacation - by the way, the amount of their vacation double or triple those in the States.

In Far East countries, the work hours and load are ridiculously long by American standards.. and everybody I talk to who’s been there seem to think that the people over there are really serious and uptight, unlike their American counterparts. On the other hand, I’ve never heard the story from a Japanese perspective.. so who knows, they might be happy, but never show their emotions to their foreign colleagues. Are they happy? Dunno.. perhaps their happiness is in work accomplishment.

So basically the article states that happiness varies from one culture to another.. but I don’t think it covers the whole human dimension.. what about family ties? what about religion? There are people who immigrate to far away countries, work very hard but send most of their income (like more than half) to their family back home. Needless to say they experience some significant hardships and deterioration in the quality of life they could have if they kept the money for themselves.. but I think those people are happy. There are Islamic Relief humanitarian workers in Darfur who get paid very little.. but I don’t think they mind.

I’ll try to add more.. but for now, it just seems that the discussion on happiness I read there wasn’t comprehensive enough.