Define: happiness

Yes, what a cliche - define happiness, lolol.

From a school reading assignment: In one online learning case, a teacher had difficulty to give grades because online learning involves a lot of assessing how a student is becoming better compared to him/herself before. In face to face classrooms, it's easy to get away with giving grades based on observing if a student is behind, ahead or just coping with how the rest of the students are performing. In online learning, much of the student's interaction is based on non-stop written correspondences. A teacher gets to see how the student is becoming better as he/she gets more and more feedback.

I was originally going to call this post define: free time. It is my belief that once afforded with free time, the mind wanders off to places that are not healthy - doubt, suspicion, idleness, and so on, as the common saying goes. We live in an age when it's common to be riddled with questions of self-worth, self-actualization, self-respect and all other questions that boil down to "why am I here?" and "who am I?". We live in a time when heartbreak is paraded for all to see, break-ups are common tabloid offerings, and even non-celebrities make their love affair, and the demise of it, known to anyone through social networking media. We post and re post quotes about love, heartbreak, finding the right person, losing the right person, seducing the right person, and everything else that can be done to the right person.

It's so easy to use love, or lack of a love life, as an excuse for raunchy behavior and depressed moments. That's what Sex and the City taught us, right? And all the other TV shows and movies before it. And even all the other classic love stories before it. So, I wonder, this quest of finding and defining happiness through love life, is it  something we believe, or is it because it's what we're trained to do? (question posed a-la Carrie Bradshaw).

Despite the Facebook and Twitter barrage of quotes about finding and not finding love, look around, and you will find, that we don't measure happiness so much based on whether or not a person is with someone. It's defined by how we see our life at the moment. Some people are happy because they have someone. Some people are happy because they are single and free to mingle. Some people are happy because they have kids, some happy because they have careers. Some are happy because they just bought their dream house, some because they are working abroad. Life, after all, is not a case of classroom vs. online learning. We don't have to fall into the trap of using other people's "performance" to measure if we are behind the rest of the pack.

So, I conclude, that the world is actually happy. We just often forget that we are because drama is so addicting and very Hollywood.