 Hi, welcome to Seymour's World Commentary. Can you answer this question, what is true happiness? I've been thinking about this question a lot lately. What does it take to be a happy person? Obviously, the answer is going to be different for each person, as someone what would make them happy and their answer is likely to be pretty vague. A good career or family, a strong relationship with my partner, these aren't real answers more like generic cliches. I think we may be unwilling to face the question of what makes us truly happy. We're afraid that the answer will prove to be something out of our grasp. Maybe you need a million dollars to be happy and you only have $3.62. Maybe you need a better job than you're capable of holding, or a bigger house that you can afford, or a prettier wife or more handsome husband, or better behaved children. Maybe you need to be smarter, better looking, more outgoing, taller, healthier, more disciplined, thinner, someone else. I don't buy it. There are unhappy people in all walks of life. If it were brains, there wouldn't be unhappy smart people. And there are. If it were money, there wouldn't be unhappy rich people. And boy, are there. If it weren't looks, there wouldn't be unhappy beautiful people. Remember Marilyn Monroe? She wouldn't have taken her own life. So I think the answer has to be self-knowledge, facing the question of what it will take to be happy head on. It's obviously not something external to us that makes us happy. We make our own happiness. But it's not as simple as just deciding I want to be happy. We make our happiness by determining what it will take, according to our own individual taste and character, to be happy and chasing after those things and only those things. Maybe you need to be rich to be happy. That's the kind of person you are. Or maybe you just need to be comfortable to not have to worry. You can't know if you're not willing or not able to face yourself and figure out what real happiness means to you. The trick here is to move beyond empty platitudes and hollow stereotypes and really look at our own lives. That's where happiness starts to take root. I have an assignment for you. It's for you and me too. It's to figure all this out, to sit down with a pad and paper and start writing out our answer to the question, what's it going to take to make me happy? But you have to be specific. What exactly do you want from life? How is each thing on your list supposed to help you create happiness in your life? Most important, are you sure these are your answers? And not societies, not your friends, not your parents, not your family. It's so easy to internalize everyone else's talk about what makes people happy but the proofs in the pudding. Are you happy? Sit down, write your list and tuck it away somewhere safe. Then go out and do the things on those lists and let me know how that works out for you. Let's see if we can't all figure this out for ourselves, okay? I'll do it too. Thank you for watching Seymour's World Commentary on Think Tech Hawaii. Please send me your comments. Aloha.