I have been thinking a lot about happiness and how uniquely it operates in the lives of the thought infested species that is humanity. You can plan a perfect weekend with all your friends, finally land a date with the person you have had your eyes on, or even go to a music festival but if you’re not happy, you’re not happy. And I should mention that by happiness I mean contentment.

A lot of thinking later and I feel like I am either spitballing or semi onto something. I mean, there must be a reason why the happiest I have been in my life came after the most stressful transition I have ever endured. Maybe a lot of happiness is self-realization manifested in growth. Maybe, we are happy when we know what actually makes us happy. As opposed to what we believe will make us happy.

I want to try and draw a line between confusion and happiness. Bear with me here.

What really distinguishes us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom? I am sure you have heard it before but it is no tale: humans are animals, human-animals, all of us. What makes us humans so special though? Surely we humans look and act differently than most other species. But, what makes us human? Now there’s obviously no perfect answer or necessarily right answer to that question. But many have said, and I agree with the many, that what makes us human beings is our ability to reason.

We have reasons for doing the things we do. We take alternate routes when traffic hits, we go through years of schooling to attain occupations, we are passionate about certain subject matters, and we wash different colored clothing separately to lower the chances of them being ruined. Humans do the things they do for their own reasons.

Amongst the many reasons we have in acting is our own happiness. Happiness, or better yet contentment, is the reason why we do essentially everything we do. The alternative routes we take relieve traffic-like conditions that stress us out.

Although the majority do not think the lack of traffic is a paradigm example of what happiness is, we make the choice to free ourselves from traffic in hopes of being more content than we would be in traffic. The same way we go to college in hopes of having a good life, and wash our clothes separately to maintain their condition. Our own happiness sits at the end of all we do.

So when humans come to make choices, whether it be who you choose to love or what university you choose to attend, you do so because you think it will make you happy. And to make things even more intense, you would be irrational otherwise. Think about it, think about going to a coffee shop; the drink you chose to get is the one you think tastes good or you think may wake you up for your 8 a.m. Either way, you get that drink because you are content when drinking it. You get the drink you want and you may complain otherwise.

The funny part about being human, however, is being imperfect. No matter how hard you try to pursue your own happiness sometimes you are going to get it wrong. Think about times where you are too full for that extra slice of pizza but eat it anyway. You eat it because you love pizza. But once it settles in, you are so full you are in pain and that doesn't really seem like happiness. Sometimes the implications are more serious than a food coma.

Sometimes, people grow in their relationships and their significant other does not match their speed or perhaps grows in a different way. All of a sudden a person finds themselves forcing a love, going through the motions of life in hopes of finding that happiness again. How many horror stories have you heard of people simply hating their jobs? Or, people staying in relationships with people who cheat on them, devalue them, and hardly know why? Sometimes we humans, with all the reason we do have, get our reasons wrong.

On the one hand, sometimes we are wrong about the specifics. We get the wrong flavor of ice cream or we major in something that does not grab us in the way we intended it to. But sometimes we have the wrong reasons for coming to love in the first place; we have the wrong idea about ourselves, which makes it impossible to know how to make us happy.

That is why confusion is good. It means you are at least aware that things are all over the place. You know you need to think about what is going on in your life, and sometimes a sign you need to change what is going on in it.

This is why it things like letting someone go, quitting the job that currently brings you nothing but stress, and changing the major your parents forced you to take make humans feel oddly content sometimes. Happiness is in all sorts of strange corners of this whole life conception. But be careful with what you take it to be. Almost never is happiness buried in the shiny objects or moments. I know you know that; and, when unhappy, becoming happy is usually a natural process. That is, happiness tends to come naturally when your values, and who you take yourself to be, reflect the life you live.

It takes strength to admit those things to yourself of course. Sometimes, it takes strength wrapped up in confusion. Because it is not easy to look yourself and acknowledge that you have made a wrong choice about a given person, life choice, or worldview. Yet once you have, things get better.