Happiness V/S "Happiness"

If I could save time in a bottle,

The first thing that I’d like to do,

Is to save everyday till eternity passes away,

And to spend them with you.

Jim Croce’s song has invited many a critic as an upshot of his excessive romanticism to the set of numbers denoted with an AM or PM alongside. People are in constant denial of the fact that the time they have is indeed limited. People here primarily refer to the individuals in their teens or early twenties. Stuck up in world of narcissism or a sort of hideous self-obsession, people are always in a pursuit to “happiness”. The difference between Happiness and “Happiness” doesn’t merely get limited to the presence of quotation marks.

The former deals with a state of legitimate well-being, denoted by a heightened sense of self-esteem and optimism. The latter principally deals with the crafting and adorning of a façade. It is obtained so long as you are able to invoke a sense envy among your fellow compatriots, regardless of whether you live you actually desire. This is often the passion that drives the ever so gullible teens into taking up Engineering and MBBS degrees; which often gets extinguished halfway leaving them helpless and with only a sight of a rope waiting to be complete with their short-sighted, incompetent heads in it.

Being an Economics student, I often get acquainted with the many irrationalities of the consumer, with one being called the Veblen effect. It is nothing but, associating quality with price which often has a direct relation with status symbol, which is often the precedent for many of our decisions. In the wine industry for example, it has time and again been proven that there is no marked difference between the cheap and the pricey wine, through a bunch of blind tasting tests. However the rich still continue to buy the expensive bottles. Why? Just to invoke a sense of envy among his peers, which through some sadistic mechanism, translates into “happiness” for him.

As Tyler Durden said in the cult classic, Fight Club, “We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.” This inherent irrationality is the reason capitalism continues to prevail and the MNCs continue to rake in profits year after year.

In conclusion, it is high time we introspect and distinguish between out happiness and our “happiness”. Live out your lives for yourselves, not for somebody else. Judging by the title, one may easily dismiss the article as too minimalistic to give a read. But, I hope that I've done a fine job in convincing you that the difference to it lies not only in the presence of quotation marks.