Level of Happiness

I remember the song "seasons of love". I have not watched the movie Rent, but I do love the song. Now, I ask, how do you measure a year? There sure are so many ways of "how to"s in this world. There are different conversions, different methods and different measurements. For many people, a year can just be treated as simply time that passed, is passing and will pass. How about happiness? How does one quantify happiness?

There is an article, though I did not read it, in Yahoo! about being able to determine the happiest place. I am not quite sure of this, because I was not able to read it at that time. I do not even know where the place is. It just made me curious how they were able to determine such thing, or feeling.

I know many people will also have a hard time quantifying their happiness. Defining it is difficult enough, actually. I, too, do not know how to state my level of happiness. One of my professors mentioned that he read this article. He said that the study took money as a factor in determining the level of happiness of a place. When he mentioned it, I even thought that he was going to say that the Philippines is the place where most people are happy. Being a Filipino, I know that whatever situation a Filipino is in, he will NEVER forget how to smile. Anyway, I have been wondering if money is a good measure for happiness. Of course, it is not the sole determinant.

This, I think, is the same when managers assume that the higher the pay, the more productive, the more determined and the more satisfied their employees are. It is not always true, right? Though I still am not working, we all are lead to this assumption. Since I am a business student, I was taught that this is "partly" true.

I think of the relationship of money and happiness like a parabola. When you really do not have money to buy either the basic necessities or the things you want, having money increases your happiness very much. But when you have so much money already, increasing it would not necessarily increase your happiness.

We all have different views on this. But when we are to be asked about what factors influence our happiness, what would you answer? Mine is that happiness can not be quantified because the things that influence my happiness can not be as well.