When I grow up I want to be happy

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy‘. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”  John Lennon

We are usually asked ”what do you want to be when you are older?”. And people expect answers such as teacher, pilot, fireman or even fisherman would not surprise them as much as ”happy”. When I heard John Lennon’s story I was striked by the accurate simplicity of his answer. It makes me think of the time my friends and I were sharing our dreams in the playground. We have never spoken about happiness as such but we were dreaming about things that would make us happy. It’s as if we had ”sub-aims” to reach happiness. For instance, we were looking for an amazing work, a lovely city to live in and a cosy home to nest. We had a future full of joy and pleasure but in the meantime the bell rung… we had to go back to class. Since then, most of us focused on how to achieve those dreams and sometimes we forgot to simply enjoy life. As we say, happiness is a journey, not the destination.

If, like John Lennon as a child, we essentially wanted to be happy we may have done things differently. We may have think about happiness and wonder about it as we did about the job of our dream.

A research even showed that people studying happiness tend to be happier. Let’s do that!