Happiness

I recently read an article called Social Animal by David Brooks, and it has a lot of very interesting concepts in it. One idea that was prevalent was happiness and how many people make their path of happiness unconsciously and use their past experiences. As David Brooks says, "Early experiences don't determine a life, but they set pathways, which can be changed or reinforced by later experiences" (pg 3). Experiences are the little things that help us go through the right "door". We try to use our experiences to make a path for ourselves that will make us happy, and will have us content with our life. This is all done within our subconscious and in our inner thoughts. "What the inner mind really wants is connection" and "daily activities most closely associated with happiness are social"(pg 5). Everyone wants to be happy and out mind and body make decisions for us without us even knowing or thinking about it. In a short scenario about a couple on their first date it says they "licked their lips, leaned forward in their chairs, glanced at each other out of the concerns of their eyes, and performed all the other tricks of unconscious choreography that people do while flirting" (pg 7). They were both showing signs of flirting and the fact that they liked each other, yet they didn't know it was happening. In the article it says "There was the hair flip: she raised her arms to adjust her hair and heaved her chest into view. She would have been appalled if she had seen herself in a mirror at that moment" (pg 7.) The fact that our body language tells a story without us even knowing is amazing. "When the tip of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine" (pg 5). There is no way to hide our feelings know matter how we try. Our body and mind know what makes us happy and will do anything to keep us following the right pathway. We can only ignore what our inner thoughts and body language say, but we can never deny the truth. We can only listen to our subconscious and embrace what we are being told. After all "the conscious mind chooses what we buy, but the unconscious mind chooses what we like" (pg 11.)