Happiness is a state of mind
As we all know, the whole world is in the grasp of the ongoing pandemic. One of the most common topics of debate in the recent past was “MENTAL HEALTH”. During June, when we lost one of the most talented young actors, Sushant Singh Rajput. We could see everyone’s insta story to be filled with utter nonsense “ Talk to me, mental health is not a joke”.
I mean, on one hand, they are sympathising with people to talk to them, while on the other when someone wants to talk to them, they are like, “Come on, grow up, Behave like an adult, Just try to feel happy”. I mean, woah, if someone is feeling depressed, then you just say to them, “ Try to be happy”, and then everything is sorted?
No, absolutely not. Just telling people to be happy, or posting those stuff on social media, is not a solution to this. In fact happiness is a state of mind.
Talking about mental health, let us take an example. During the pandemic, a statement of Jada Pinkett Smith went viral, where she was talking about her relationship with August Alsina when the couple were separated for a while. That was the time when everyone was literally sitting idle at their homes and focusing on portraying themselves to be caring enough. At that moment, everyone found Will Smith to be quite depressed because of his personal life. But the public, instead of supporting the actor, turned one of his depressed pics into a meme template. Such a flaunty world we live in. On one side everyone was trying to care for every other person on this planet (sarcastically though), while on the other, they did not think of the mental pressure Smith was going through.
In his book, “Everything is Fucked”, Mark Manson says, that happiness is a state of mind. And the opposite of happiness is not sadness or anger, rather it is the feeling of hopelessness. This is true. Most of us think that if someone is sad or angry due to some reason, then they are depressed. But this is not true. Sadness and anger are somewhat temporary feelings caused due to some situation resulting in temporary outcomes not in favour of that person.
Depression is actually a state of mind when the person has lost all hopes of living. If someone thinks there is no point in this world anymore, then they are actually depressed. If by just talking nonsense, we were able to make others “happy”, then definitely there would not have been any psychiatrists or counsellors. If we watch movies like “Dear Zindagi”, we can witness that the counsellors there are not trying to make the subject happy, instead they are focussing on generating hope somehow inside them. Honestly speaking, there is a dearth of skilled psychologists around the globe.
What happens most of the time is, people somehow, take some temporary failures as quite a serious happening, as a result of which they lose hope in living any more. Feeling unhappy for a few days is acceptable, but if we do not find hope anywhere in this world, then we become more like zombies. We have all our physical organs intact, but we forbid ourselves from finding happiness anywhere. We prevent ourselves from getting involved with people etc.
Happiness is more like a subjective topic. Some may find happiness in all the events happening around them, but some might even have negative vibes around them even if they would have achieved a lot, though lesser than what they expected.
Let us debate upon this with the help of some examples. First, we take up the case of festivals like Deepawali. Recently most of the state governments had banned crackers during the Diwali period, stating pollution as a reason. As a result of which, some people, including me as well, were quite upset, as we were the ones who used to burn crackers worth thousands of bucks, just to make our festival memorable. On the contrary, there were some artisans who make the idols of Shree Ganesh — Laxmi, for the Diwali poojan ceremony in every household. Due to the monopoly of industrialists in the market, cheap factory-made idols are sold the most. This year, due to the risks of the pandemic, most of the people did not even step out of their houses for shopping, rather they prepared some idols by themselves. As a result, the local artisans had to face huge losses. Now, if we see, on one hand not able to burst crackers was a reason for some of us to feel dejected, but on the other, if those artisans were able to earn a few bucks by selling their hand made idols they would sleep peacefully and felt cheerful to work ahead.
Let us move forward. During the nationwide lockdown from march, all of us had to struggle a bit as we were not accustomed to the new way of living, while confined to the four walls. During those times, Tapsee Pannu tweeted about her non-functional air conditioner and said “The struggle is real”. But we all know the miseries faced by the migrant labourers. When all the industries, factories were shut down, they were deprived of even the basic necessities and had to move back to their local villages to stay alive. At that moment, people like Sonu Sood, led from the front to help these people. In an interview, he claimed that for two months, he did not even meet his children. So we can see how different people treat happiness differently. In one case one actress was somewhat not feeling good due to the air conditioner. While on the other, some felt really cheerful while helping others.
At the end, I would conclude by saying that our life is quite precious and we have to live it by ourselves. We must try our best to find rays of hopes in anything we can. To accomplish this, we must segregate ourselves from the sources spreading negative vibes all around. Just for an example, I had segregated my self from the news channels and many other media sources, just because, whole day long they would showcase news about corona virus, suicide of SSR, drugs case, murder etc. Yes, I know, it is necessary to be connected with the world. But as I said, we must try to find rays of hopes everywhere. Although the virus struck the whole world, still there had been various achievements made by mankind, about which no one was talking. That is where we need to get mature. We must become mature enough to differentiate between sadness and depression. We must not take mental health as a joke (we must not post such content, if somehow in the past we had ignored somebody intentionally or maybe hurt them intentionally to fulfill our purpose). We must work for the well being of society and try to spread happiness all around.
Scribbled By: Nimit Agarwal, student at IIT Gandhinagar
