People expect one method, idea or behavior leading them to happiness, while happiness is not a simple goal or concept that people can easily reach or achieve on their lives. Happiness is a very wide concept and it contains many complexities and many levels. In other words, there are plenty Kinds of happiness like happiness coming from success, personal achievements or from being in love or friendship etc.. .Human need for happiness differs from one type of happiness to another and all of these types form a wide web of different needs. Fulfilling these different needs and reaching to many types of happiness require massive number of individual actions which should intertwine with a person`s habitat. As consequence reaching to a perfect happy life style has a structural connection with various levels of subjective and objective conditions and criteria , for instance, it is noteworthy that happiness has a structural relation with time according to a general tendency that happiness which we can get in early age is more pure than happiness we can get in old age because there is more availability of time to obtain new skills and invest new opportunities to reach to more levels of happiness. The prior understanding to the diversity, complexity and sometimes contradictions among types of happiness beside recognizing how many risks and how many intellectual and practical effort are needed to access to many types of happiness interpret the dominance of disappointment among people for not being satisfied with their feeling of happiness.
This brief analyzing to the nature of happiness is not for justifying the common feeling of disappointment among people, but it is for rethinking of how to deal with future possibilities and how to construct hope. Moreover, it is important to redefine the concept of hope to release it from the metaphysical aspects. Therefore, hope should not be defined as waiting for good results to emerge magically on the future because hope is not a faith that you believe in, but it is something that you construct. Forming a cohesive pattern of hope is mainly based on three basic skills including the considering of the supportive and disruptive factors of person habitat.
The first skill and the most important one is knowing precisely what pattern of happiness is the most urgent to your life. This skill is deadly important before moving to practice the next skill because misleading it will cause a great damages to the ability of keep going with other skills. Being skeptical about what you want will limit your effort to hesitating movements which means an arbitrary effort. The arbitrary effort will lead you to depressive attitude beside losing time and energy which will make you unable to requisition what you really want. After deciding deeply the pattern of happiness that you want, you can start with second skill which is studying your habitat and its condition carefully. Then you should search for gaps that you can work through to reach the level of happiness that you need. The Third skill is estimating accurately the effort that you should make and the time you should take for achieving what you want , then you start working according to your estimations. The banker, Andy Dufresne who is a hero character in drama film Shawshank Redemption represents a literal example for practicing all these three skills. I wish if I could give an example from the real life instead of a fictional character , but he incredibly fits the statements and he is probably recognized by many among the readers. Andy carefully studied the environment of the prison and the kind of relations between guards and prisoners. He slowly succeeded to find gaps through these relations and to get what was required to dig a tunnel. He needed 19 years to finish digging and to achieve his goal in getting out of prison. Moreover, these gaps allowed him to start managing financial matters for prison employees and to make money laundry which helped him to secure himself financially after his successful escape. In addition to elucidate these three skills, I would like to hint at another level of concept of hope which is waiting for radical changes.
Waiting for radical changes is another gap in traditional definition of hope which makes it fragile and easy to collapse. This gap is formed because of basic misunderstanding to the nature of radical changes. Radical changes or solutions in anyone`s life are mainly constituted by accumulation of partial solutions. Depending on partial solution and managing them rightfully are very basic steps for paving the way in front of radical changes. We cannot bring out the concept of radical changes without mentioning its connection with the concept of luck because reconsidering the relation between these two concept is urgent. Expecting a good future possibility is a mutual aspect between them. However, the concept of radical changes is limited to high quality of good future possibility, while the concept of luck is opened to all degrees or levels of good future possibility. The criteria of good future possibility are circumscribed by two circles. The circle of a person`s habitat circumstances and the circle of personal effort. The circle of a person`s habitat circumstances can lead to good future possibilities as much as it forms supportive conditions which identify the quantity and the quality of gaps that a person can work through. On the other hand, the circle of a personal effort includes the quality of actions and the level of person`s abilities in investing the gaps of his or her habitat for accessing to good future possibility.
Good future possibilities are the direct results of our present actions, Even a high quality of good future possibility with low guarantee for occurrence like winning the lottery is a result of buying the ticket. Therefore, it is noteworthy that hope should be built by actions leading to good future possibility with high guarantee for occurrence. I have already mentioned winning the lottery as an example for accessing to good future possibility (getting wealth) as a result of one action(buying the ticket) with low guarantee for happening, so I will give another practical example for actions leading to good future possibility with high guarantee for happening. Market owner can build hope for improving his or her financial situation with high guarantee for achieving his or her goal by following the next steps. First, knowing precisely customers` need and providing goods to the market according to the these needs. Second, extending the knowledge about marketing requirements like estimating people`s purchase power. Third, investing the profits in adding extra kinds of goods to the market and expanding the business. These steps represent a method the that actions within lead to the possibility of getting more wealth on the future with high guarantee for occurrence.
Gambling system contains variety of methods for accessing to the possibilities of getting more wealth on the future with different levels of guarantee for happening. Some of these methods give 50/50 chance to get more wealth on the future, while others give more or less than 50% to reach to good future possibility. However, some of gambling methods have reflective sequences, the hope of obtaining more wealth on future may causes diminishing of this wealth which may reaches to disastrous level. As a result, the future possibilities for obtaining more wealth on future can be classified according to the outcomes of the gambling system as the following; very good possibility, good possibility, bad possibility and disastrous possibility. Therefore, we can infer that the quantity and the quality of actions and efforts to reach good future possibilities are identified by the systems built to reach them. The space of the so called luck is also identified by the systems that humans created to reach good future possibility. If we define luck as reaching to good future possibility with low guarantee for occurrence, it will not be achieved without system allowing it. For example, if there was no lottery system, there would not be lucky people getting wealth by depending on one action which is buying the ticket. The mechanism of luck is not metaphysical as many people think, but it is directly connected to the systems which are built to reach to good future possibilities.
To clarify more this thesis, I will move to discus reaching to good future possibility on another field. Getting a high score is the most prominent future possibility that most of the students hope to get. Memorizing data and information beside acquiring the required academic and scientific skills to analyze the data of the academic courses or discovering new data by doing an academic research are the most basic methods followed by students to obtain a high score or average. Unlike the variety of required efforts and levels of guarantee for getting more wealth on the future, reaching to good future possibility with high guarantee for happening within the educational systems needs a very organized and precise effort. The relation between the guarantee for accessing to good future possibility and students` effort is an inverse one. On other words, the connection between the efforts and the future results is structural. For instance, on automation exams which mostly provide four answers (A,B,C,D) for each question, and only one of them is the right answer, you should chose at least 50% or 60% of the right answers to pass the exam. Therefore, if you have no data about exam course, you will have ¼ chance to pick the right answer for each question. Moreover, you should be able successfully to achieve ¼ percentage in 50% or 60% of your answers for passing the exam which is mathematically impossible without any effort in memorizing and analyzing the data of the exam course according to this mathematical calculation: : “ 100! / ( 60! * 40! ) * 0.25 ^60
1.0342e-08
This calculation indicates that only one student can pass automation exam among approximately 100 million students who have no data about exam course.
As a conclusion, the future possibilities in every field in our lives are genuinely connected to the systems and methods established by human societies to reach them. They also determine the range of randomness and personal effort influences in forming the future possibilities. Recognizing the mechanisms of these systems and methods is the corner stone in creating deep and wide understanding in how to manufacture our future.
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Odai Wardehكاتب مقالات سياسية و فلسفية و حاصل على جائزة وزارة الثقافة للشعر في الجمهورية العربية السورية عام 2007