The Art of Happiness - To Love and To Give

In the last chapter, we found that being charitable and generous makes us happier. Every person in this world should have this desire to love and to give. It is not the desire to impress others and show that you are a good person that motivates us to be generous.

Studies show that those who are benevolent on day to day basis are happier than others who do not do charity or generosity too frequently. People around the world differ in terms of ethnicity, creed, food, love for sports, material wealth etc. Yet people feel across the world feel happy when they do charity. A study was conducted with kids and it was found that even kids become happy when they are generous to other people.

The study was conducted on kids because kids are sometimes quite self-centered in their own ways. They generally don’t like to share their belongings easily with others. But when kids were studied after they shared their belongings with others, it was found that the kids were happier. This shows that we all have the need to love and give.

Social Conditions Matter

We also need to know how much generous one should be, when one should be generous and how one should show generosity. If a person is brought up by his parents with the lessons to be generous and kind and if the society around the kid also encourages this belief of being kind to everyone, then the kid will grow up to be kind and benevolent. However, if the parents teach him to be self-centered all the time and if the society around the kid also discourage being kind and generous, then the kid will certainly not be kind to anyone around him.

Why does being generous help us to be happy? The prime reason behind this is that if we help others, it gives us a feeling that we are capable of bringing in a change in others’ lives and we have some competency within us. This boosts our confidence levels and leads to happiness. Moreover, when we help someone, the recipient becomes bound to help us the next time we need help. This is the reason why being helpful helps us in the long run too.

Draw the Line

It is important to understand that being too generous is also not good for us. We need to maintain balance. Draining all your money for charity and having nothing for oneself is not going to help us either. It is important for us not to burn a hole in our pockets while doing charity.

Those who are highly successful entrepreneurs or businessmen also do charity but they do not exhaust their resources just for the sake of doing charity. There must be a limit for everything that we do and at any cost, we should not exceed that level wherein, we burn out our own resources and don’t have enough resources for our own survival.