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Chapter 3

The Good Life

A good life, meanwhile, is being able to live and make a living doing what you are good at.

Most of the self help publications focus on achieving a good life.

We have all done it; completed the questionnaires either in magazines, on the internet or may be through work based training, to find our strengths and weaknesses. Then we are told to focus on our strengths and see our weaknesses as opportunities to develop. But primarily focus on your strengths.

Having identified our strengths we then set about setting objective, goals and action plans to ‘progress’. To move forward. When we achieve our objectives we feel really good, we have increased our income, improved our lifestyle and we feel really good.

• Maybe you are a salesperson with regular targets to be met. You enjoy talking to people and making them feel good so you find your sales are increasing and your salary likewise. You are liked by all. Your happiness rises; you are the tops, the idol of the company. You can eat in the best restaurants, stay at the best hotels, you feel really important and revel in the lifestyle. This is the good life; it lasts as long as your sales skills and the products stay in fashion. Once the product is out of fashion you have to change companies and start again. You call it a challenge, but each time you change companies your happiness takes a knock until you reach the top again. Happiness is associated with success. The more successful you are the happier you are.

The driver for this type of happiness is not money that is the result of the successful use of your skills, your strengths. The key is doing something you are good at.

• Perhaps it is playing an instrument. Total happiness whilst engaged in the task. Everything else disappears to insignificance.

• Perhaps you are a computer wiz, Once you get on that machine you forget, time, You....you dream about posting to forums
  ....you dream about posting just to find that you actually did make the post in your sleep!
  ....you know members and facilitators and chat room colleagues by their first name, but couldn't tell anyone who your neighbours are, or if you even have neighbours.
  ....you talk to friends and co-workers about something  that Claudio, Mafeking, Juliana , Guido, etc. said and you don't realise that you should explain who they are and how you know them.
  ....you insist that everyone should join a particular group or web site even those who DO NOT own computers and are NOT connected to the internet.

All the time you are connected you have total happiness, you are doing something you are good at and something you enjoy. You have a Good life. But how long does it last?

You are still dealing with symptoms rather than the causes of happiness? The point is that using your skills to make money is relatively easy. And the world is set up to make us believe that money and possessions insure a life of happiness. If this is true, why is it that at a time when people in the industrialised world are more wealthy, have more material goods, have sufficient time and money to travel where they wish, are better educated and greater personal freedom more and more people say they are unhappy and the  cases of clinical depression are rising so fast?

The Good life doesn’t seem to be the answer. There must be another way.

 Next: The Meaningful Life