Is Happiness a Choice?

In the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy there is a quote where one of the characters states “I’d far rather be happy than right any day.” This quote has always stuck with me, as it gives the impression that this is a choice. That in life we have a choice to either be happy or wrong.

You are probably noticing that this quote is very similar to the saying “ignorance is bliss” and it is, though this one has always hit me harder. Probably because it made it seem as if it was a choice and not just a reality. It made me question if I myself would rather be right and depressed or be wrong but happy. It made me question if there was any purpose in being right if you were not happy, after all happiness is one of the greatest reasons we have to live.

At the same time though living to just be happy causes a moral dilemma. Is ignoring the pain and suffering of others ok if you are happy? This is a question I suffered with for a while. It seemed to me as if my options were to be miserable and right or be ignorant yet happy. As you can guess this was not a very good thought, the idea of lying to myself was not appealing. So what was I to do? Is it possible to acknowledge the problems the world has while also being happy?

It seemed as if happiness was not something I controlled but just something I felt and thus it would in fact be impossible to change. Though I was missing something. Almost all that time I never realized I was being pessimistic. I started to look at things more at how they could get better and the things that were already good opposed to dwelling on how shit the world was, and I found I became much happier. So I found that happiness was in a way a choice we could make. Though you don’t have to give up being right, you simply have to change your perspective.