Discussion : "Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions"

I also think it might mean that "happiness" is not something you merely seek, it's something you have to create :)

It's more reliable to prioritize your own happiness and do things that increase the likelihood of your being happy, than to rely on others to make you happy. This much I agree with. We don't have complete control over our emotions. We can't say that if we're not happy, we're just not choosing happiness. Emotions don't work that way. If we could flip a switch in our brains so that we were always happy, we would do so.

We can make choices that influence ourselves to feel happy, but if someone is suffering from depression, they will struggle to do even that. They will struggle to feel happy. And they're not making a choice to be depressed. To think so is to imply that mental health disorders are a choice, which is preposterous.

All we can do is influence our emotions to work in our favour. We still have to feel them fully for them to be released. Otherwise, they stick around and hurt us in the long run. If we continually deny how we're feeling presently in order to try and force happiness, we're not doing ourselves any favours; we're denying, invalidating, and repressing our feelings. One of the concerns I have with the "happiness is a choice" philosophy is that is does not acknowledge the problems denying our actual current felt emotions brings. It also fails to acknowledge the usefulness of our emotions, in general.

Our emotions offer important insight into what matters to us, how we're doing in life, and if we need to correct our path. They're worth paying attention to. And despite our natural desire to avoid pain, painful emotions require our feeling them for them to release us from their grip.

That requires being able to have the permission to feel those emotions, knowing how to soothe ourselves, and having emotionally healthy people in our lives who we can trust to not invalidate our emotions, but to understand and comfort us when we're troubled.

We can't do any of this if we're shutting out how we feel, trying to forcibly change our emotions so that we only feel happiness. Again, we don't have control over our emotions that way. Better to learn to cope and find a way to process them and move forward, with the inner knowledge and understanding they provide us so we can make thoughtful changes, than to brute force ourselves into feeling only what we want. It only makes problems for us down the road when we repress what's really going on inside of us.