The Happiness that Matters Most

The happiest days of my life have been the product of spending quality time with family and friends. If you are seeking happiness, you should do the same.

Even just sitting down for dinner with your family can be the cause of great happiness. And those dreaded family occasions, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, can be amazingly fun if you go at them with the right attitude. Listen to your Aunts and Uncles bickering about the time they threw their pet duck off the roof to see if it could fly, or learn all of those things that your parents didn’t think you would ever learn about them, like the time your mother pierced her own ears with a tooth pick. Not to mention all the good food that your grandmother can cook. Your immediate family is also very important for happiness. Spending time with your parents and siblings is important and is the cause of happy moments. Be nerdy and bust out that dusty game of Monopoly and play it with your family and just spend good quality time connecting and catching up on things in your lives. There is nothing more important than family, so don’t waste the precious time you have with them by not spending time with them and letting trivial things get in the way of what’s most important. It doesn’t matter where you are in your family. Whether you are the university student who is spending less and less time with their family because they have to go away for school, or the younger kid who has to do homework and their chores, or the working parent of children, or the person who just moved out, or the grandparent who has experienced all of this, family is important, and you will be happier if you don’t take them for granted and spend those precious moments with your family in all your walks of life.

And then there are your friends. Every person has friends, but you should consider yourself very lucky if you have those seasoned friends that have stuck with you and will stick with you through the trials and tribulations of life. Just imagine sitting by a campfire with your friends talking the night away looking at the stars and not wanting to be anywhere else in the world. Just imagine having friends support you when something goes terribly wrong in your life. It is friends, and family, that make these times bearable. You can have an amazingly fun time with your friends, and they will make you very happy. Life will not be a happy experience if you go through it alone. You can do it all, but it will all have been miserable unless you have friends and family to share experiences with. Even those times where you get together with your friends and spend the majority of the evening figuring out what exactly you want to do are great.

Life is only happy if you go through it with someone to stand by you, and nobody will stand by you like your friends and family, so do everything you can with them. Spend as much time as you can with your friends and family, even the little things. You can’t do it alone. So make those great friends, don’t forget about your family, and be happy.