In my philosophy class this past semester, we talked about measuring happiness based on different actions or acquisition of “things.” Some people get the same amount of happiness from vastly different things. In philosophy, we talk about the “simple man,” who gets a maximal amount of happiness from something like watching a sunset, but there are others who get the same amount of happiness in buying a Ferrari. We all have a general idea of where we fit on this spectrum, but no matter if you’re closer to the high-end car side than to the sunset side, I’m here to tell you that we all need to be appreciating the little things.
Despite the term, "little things” come in all shapes and sizes. Many times, they aren’t even tangible. It has been said time and time again that the best way to make yourself happy is to make someone else happy. How can that be measured? Impossible, right? But if you do something nice for someone else, it should be pretty easy to tell how happy you’re making them. And from that, it should be even easier to measure your own happiness. People are often surprised at how much happiness they experience doing something for someone else. Doing something nice for someone can take a multitude of forms: complimenting another person, paying it forward or helping someone out. It doesn’t take that much effort to propel the happiness forward, due to the fact that you doing something nice for someone else compels them to, in turn, do something nice for another person, carrying the trend.
Sometimes, little things don’t have to do with people at all. The other day, I saw a tiny lizard in my backyard, and it was so cute and green that it made me smile. My dad is growing vegetables in a little garden in our backyard, and we had our first Japanese eggplants appear on the vine last week. It was cause for celebration! Such instances may sound trivial, or like a lame way to find excitement. Yet, there are so many interesting things going on around us, and when you think about all the things that could go wrong in certain situations, it’s cool to think of the fortune we have in seeing things come to fruition (literally, in the case of the garden). That lizard could’ve gotten squished by a car passing through the neighborhood, and I would have never been able to see its bright green color. My dad’s vegetables could have disliked the soil and never grown, or they could’ve gotten eaten by a rabbit. With the way the world works, there are enough bad things happening and challenges to overcome for every being that we cannot forget to appreciate when good things happen. We shouldn’t be pessimistic about the world and all that it brings to us, through nature and its people, but should instead find happiness in the small things, like the simple man, since those things really aren’t that small at all.
