By: Taban Khajehnassiri
The article was an editorial of WWN MAR 11, 2000. Happiness depends on what makes you feel happy. What makes you feel happy when you are on-line connected to the Internet, exchanging e-mails and participating in chats with others? ...
What is this thing called happiness? For ages, it has been an unanswered
question for people on this planet. But philosophers and psychologists of
our world and of our time have studied and tired to answer the question of
happiness from different viewpoints. Aristotle said once that happiness
was the reward of an active life lived with sweet reason. Sigmund Freud
said it was mostly a matter of work and love. In early 1990's, social
psychologists plumbed the heart of happiness with scales and tests, and
their final answer to this mystery was that it all depended. But they
showed us that happiness was not as many might expect, success, youth,
good looks or any of these wanting and enviable assets. In other words,
happiness is something that we are consuming daily but at the same time we
have to produce it in the best possible way. G.B. Shaw once put it in this
way: "We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than
to consume wealth without producing it." The answer of today's scientists
is clearly "relationships", take for instance happy marriages and then
religious faiths. Happiness depends on what makes you feel happy. What
makes you feel happy when you are on-line connected to the Internet,
exchanging e-mails and participating in chats with others?
We live our lives anyway, sometimes we are asleep, sometime we are awake.
We have no other choices. We have learned to count our blessings to have a
good and pleasant sleep. Even in this way we are trying to provide
ourselves with happiness. I believe the gates of success will be opened to
us. No matter where we are, what we do in the office or in our home, we
have to be aware of the power of happiness. With close relationships to
people and God, we will ride safe and sound on the road of success in our
lives, in work and let me say with love.
As Internet users, we are spending some parts of our time on the net using
our computers. We have an e-mail account, a web site. We are marketing (a)
product(s) or (a) service(s), we want success, wealth and well-being. I
believe that we have to produce online happiness, because sometimes the
(online) life may be nasty and short, and out there, there are people who
want to consume it and sure they'll need it. What can we do to ensure the
happiness when we are doing business online, when we are getting
information from net resources, making communications and building up new
relationships, with people around the globe? To answer this question, let
me continue this way, we can maintain and show happiness in our e-mails
more often. Sending e-mails of appreciation and thanks to customers or
webmasters can surely increase the scale of happiness worldwide, and also
the scale of sales. Try to build up new positive emotions of affects at
any time of a day when you are online, sending or receiving messages to or
from relatives, friends and customers. Remind and write about happy
occasions, memories and pleasant emotions. Well you understand that I am
not saying you send jokes to customers to maintain the scale of happiness
online, but remembering a good and mutual happy meeting or business with
the client can be fruitful. When you are on the world wide web's waiting
status, try to think about something pleasant and happy, look at a picture
of your loved ones. Make an actual happiness laboratory of your own life,
test ways you think they work. As a real example of this and making a
memorable moment, let me show you how it works: Our Iranian New Year,
Norouz 1379 is close. The happiest day of all Iranians throughout the
world is coming soon again and by mentioning it here I would like to
direct this e-motion picture called "Happiness, online and offline" with a
happy happy ending, just like this :)