How do you measure happiness? More specifically, how do you measure other people's happiness?
Whenever I enter a discussion about this with my parents, we always end up in arguments. They insist that with what I don't have, it must be hard for me to be happy. I don't have an asset, I'm not married so I can only rely on myself to support my life, I have a steady job with not-so-steady income, and every once in a while, I expose myself to some financial risk because of my insisting on doing the hard task of promoting classical music in the community. So how can you be happy?
It's funny to me how people always think they can measure other people's happiness. I have a reformed gay friend who's now happily married (to a wonderful woman) with an adorable little girl. He perpetually posts pictures of his little family and they all look blissfully happy. But my friends from the gay community always said he must be faking it, as he is betraying his true identity. But how do thet know? What makes people so sure that he hasn't already thought about the trade-off? His denouncing his homosexuality for an exchange with family life might be the best decision he made in his life. Who are we to judge?
I used to work closely with a very difficult, demanding, hardworking French guy who was leading a cultural institute in Bandung. He was very exact in his command and did not want to take nonsense from anyone. He came before everyone else and left after everyone arrived home, every single day of the week. His staffs naturally hated him. Once he was sitting alone during lunch and a lady who worked for him said that that's the price of being such a perfectionist boss. You don't have friends to have lunch with. But then again, I looked at him. He didn't look miserable, in fact, I think he kind of enjoyed his alone time of the day where no one bug him with anything. He probably chose to eat alone. Yet people easily and quickly think he must be unhappy.
It frustrates and annoys me a lot when people start to judge other people's life. In most cases, people can only measure things by their own standard, very few can really know and understand what is held as valuable by others. It angers me a lot when my parents start to judge my life based on their standard, when it's obviously clear that we are standing on a different page. And why would you want to measure other people's happiness anyway, when all you need to care about is your own?
