Search For True Happiness

How can I find true happiness? Each one of us, while living in the world, often goes through ups and downs, contentment and sadness, or success and failure. Then, there must be a time when one pauses for a moment to raise some questions, such as: What is the goal of my life now? Happiness is the one thing I have been searching for the most. Can I become a better and happier person? What is the purpose of my life in the long term? If I want to live in true happiness, should I also help others to achieve the same goal?There may be a variety of ways of finding happiness, but do all of them indeed lead to true happiness, and are all of them practical for most people? Saint Paul teaches people how to find true happiness when he says: 'The Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating or drinking, but of justice, peace, and the joy that is given by the Holy Spirit' (Rm. 14: 17). Sociologists, philosophers, theologians, psychologists, educators, and politicians have attempted to put emphasis on certain elements required for achieving true happiness. Some proposals emphasize the material richness or fame in society; others accentuate higher educational degrees or success in business and vocation; still others underline power, ideology, or talents. This book proposes a method that everyone can practice in life in order to find true happiness, underscoring human maturity as the required element for making a person truly happy.It may be true that money and social respect are the two most important conditions and contributions to some people’s happiness. However, many individuals with high financial and social achievement may not be truly happy. On the opposite spectrum, many people who may be poor financially, without a higher educational degree or fame in society, are happy. Is there a common method for both the poor and the rich, famous, and ordinary people to find true happiness? Yes, this book has the answer. Once human formation is fully acquired, a person can be happy with their self-being, no matter whether he is poor or rich, at a higher or lower educational level, has fame, or is without notable achievement in society. With full human formation, she/he has equipped herself/himself with the prerequisite conditions for a truly happy life. This is the internal constituent required for contentment, while other components, such as job, material wealth, fame, power, talents, and achievements, are external. External elements can contribute to satisfaction, but they need to be accompanied by mature human development projected for a person who is seeking true happiness.The goal of this book is to present an effective approach for achieving the fundamental conditions required for true happiness. We are convinced that rich people can be happy, and so can the poor. All people of all social levels can find true happiness when they develop in themselves human formation through understanding and practicing virtues. Our hope is that readers will learn to understand and practice virtues in order to grow as mature human beings and achieve true happiness in present life (Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia. IIae, Q. 5, A. 7; Q. 62, A. 1).