Happiness

Are you happy? Such a simple question to ask, but is the answer to happiness as simple?

Happiness is a feeling of pleasure and contentment, having a sense of confidence in or satisfaction with certain situation, arrangement or even to ourself. But does it mean that to live a happy life, one has to be content and satisfy with every aspect of our life?

I remember reading about happiness from a book, and i couldn't be more agree with the author's claim. It says -  happiness is comparative, in other words, you'd feel happy by knowing some one else is worse off than you.

One example quoted by the book, imagine one day you receive a letter with a 10 thousand dollars check from a relative you hardly know.  Apparently this relative of yours is dying, and has no close descendant to inherit his money so he simply split his wealth and send them to all the relative he could remember before he dies.

Now, 10 thousand dollar dropped into your pocket just like this,i bet anyone would be skipping and dancing with joy at that point,and couldn't wait to share the news to others... but, say if you found out from another cousin that he also got the money from the relative too, only with 10 thousand more than what you got... how would you feel now? Still as happy?

I had always thought that there are metrics to gage happiness , like one has to meet a set of requirement that lead you to happiness, but if happiness is really comparative, due to the competitive nature of people, happiness has become a moving target, the pursuit of happiness can be a never ending journey for certain people.

Well... there will always be some over achieving friends or cousins around us, if we are being overly obsess about how we are doing compare with others, we would never find happiness in our life. We should learn to appreciate what we already have and be happy about who we are.

There's a fine line...

Call me a skeptic... or am i?

I was born as a Buddhist ( which most of Malaysian Chinese claim they are, but practically we are not) but hardly seen my parents practicing Buddhism. When i was 5, my family converted to become Christian, and then i spent the next 2-3 years in Sunday school but never got baptize till today. Despite that, i still declare myself as Christian because i've used to being known as one, and i got to fill up something in the "Religion" section of Mykad application, albeit technically and practically I'm far from being one.

The fact that i'm not fully committed to the any religion doesn't stop me to think that kids should be raised under influence of a religion, to help them define what's right and wrong. But why i failed to commit to any religion? .. i think i know the answer... it's because i ask too damn many why..

If there's one thing i never failed to do in my life, it is asking why in every damn thing i ever came across. I hate to admit but this attribute makes Engineering a perfect career choice for me. I tend to see things from logical and scientific perspective, so I always struggle when i failed to figure out why something happened and why something needs to happen. I'm annoyed when i need to do something, albeit small thing, without knowing why it has to be done... unfortunately, being a Malaysia Chinese and having constant needs of knowing why, is not the best combination...

I mean... we never run short of supply for pantang larang ( taboo) in Malaysia. 1st of all Taboo exists in every culture and religion in the world, and in Malaysia, not to mention the variety of races and religions we have,  only among Chinese, we have hokkien, hakka, teo cheow, hainan... etc.. so if we combine every patang larang from these cultures, i'm talking about a yellow pages thick of document, and that's just the table of content.

While this entry is not suppose to list down all of those, i do have one to share. I remember one of my uncle passed away when i was 14, as our family gathered at his funeral mourning for his departure, one of the elderly told us not to visit my uncle's grave stone in after the funeral, because he was born in certain time and date... and if the family member insist to do so, it will  bring bad luck to the family. He then bring up that my grandma has the same condition too, that went on to explain that's the reason our family failed to bond because we've been visiting and cleaning my grandma's grave very year. I'm not sure how true is the claim, but one thing true is no one ever visited my grandma's grave after that, and... the relationship among the families remains

Cults and traditional practice define the line between cultures, races and religions, it is important because it is human nature to associate ourself to a group, to have the sense of identity. But i think we should also draw a line between a healthy cultural tradition, and a meaningless taboo which doesn't make any logical sense. I know people in the past must had reasons to create those taboos, but at the same time those days the earth was perceived as a flat surface, conquering mainland China means conquering the whole world and if the weather is too hot,the solution was shoot down the Sun with an arrow.

Let's expand the cake

i'm not a huge fan of Malaysia's politic...

Dun get me wrong, i like my country very much and always been proud of being a Malaysian. Malaysia is a country blessed with abundance of natural resources.  best if all... we don't have super disastrous earth quake or tsunami  situation to be concerned of... I mean.. that's pole position in a race of economic development among others countries, right?...but despite all those competitive advantages, we "manage" to let other less resourceful countries to out perform us, one good example is our good neighbor, Singapore. When Singapore seceded Malaysia couple of decades ago, who would have thought they could go this far? Today we are behind them in terms of many aspect, and recently...  Singapore, a country that don't even have enough natural water supply, surpassed Malaysia in terms of GDP last year, heartburn ?( actually, we might be able to feel some sense of achievement because i pretty sure our fellow malaysians who work in Singapore have got significant contribution to this.)

Not sure bout you.. but i sense the urgency for us to buck up and go up one notch on developing the country's economy... well.. for a start, let's stop all the stupid political fiasco about religion, racial and who should enjoy more privilege kind of topics... Malaysia is going 54 in about 4 months time and our politician still want to argue about things that should had put into bed 50 years ago... Childish political tactics like sexual scandal, and more sexual scandal seems to be all we care about nowadays. Every one is so agitated about everything that some what related to racial and religious topic... our politician leaders are so over-reacting on small issue, almost as bad as a football players spinning 540 degree before falling to the ground when some one tripped their toe.

To make things worse, our media seems enjoy to play along with it, instead of leading the society by propagating more meaningful information and putting things into perspective and educate the public... our media like to talk about sodomy and public porn screening. this is just too pathetic...

As a citizen, i'll continue to fulfill my due diligence by paying taxes, but i hope our leaders can settle their differences and look at the bigger picture... else we continue to be busy arguing who should get the bigger cut of the cake, but others already expanding the size of their cake. After all, in the end of the day, what really matters?