My thoughts about “A Formula for Happiness”

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My thoughts about “A Formula for Happiness”, which I reprinted a few days ago


This article is very informative about a topic most of us put on the “back burner” – being happy.  We go through life with the idea that we must sacrifice, muster on, reciprocate, work, perseverance, tolerate, sacrifice, attain, reach, carry on, and generally live without thought and without questioning the “why” of it all.


Beyond this, many of us (MYSELF INCLUDED), either belittle or even internally mocks those why do little more than spend their time looking for meaning without doing much in producing or creating anything – the perpetual graduate student (I think some people would have thrown me into that group for a while), the thinkers, the complainers, and the pool we can call “the naval-gazers”: people who seem devoted to little more than themselves.

Here I write that last paragraph yet I have written commentary about an op-ed piece that concerns a topic of such a personal nature – “happiness”. Without a doubt “happiness” is something that has meaning unique to all of us, only we can decide its personal meaning to us and, without a doubt, only we can decide whether it is worth pursuing and whether it has been reached.  No matter what it means to us, only we can decide whether we have reached it in our lives, that perpetual pursuit that morphs and changes through our lives and can be, for many, out of our grasp until we make the conscious decision it has been reached.

Is happiness synonymous with “fulfillment”?  For many people it is the same thing but fulfillment is a word best used in retrospect as in “I am fulfilled by what I have accomplished”, again by what I deem to be a goal reached (which is personal for all of us).

What can be frustrating is that we have all encountered significant people in our lives who tell us to “be happy” – they have made the decision that what they see of us, what we have, or what we have done should be equated with us being “happy” about these outcomes.  What they mean to say is “if what you have or what I have done was mine, I would be happy.”

One of the points touched on in the article is work, employment, career (whatever you call it, even if each of those words differ in their meaning to each of us) – that means by which we make a living in return for remuneration.  Our needs and definition of this idea changes through our lives.  What we wanted this part of our life to mean and accomplish can, and often does, evolve through our lives.

I am a case in point.  While my twin brother, Larry, went to college and earned his BA and MA in five years before applying and attending law school, I have had a chain of very different careers each of which demanded a graduate degree.  Each, in turn, was not what made me happy and I found myself unsatisfied, trying to detect a way to find enjoyment in whatever was this career choice, and hoping to make an income and stop looking.

Work, career, income source – each is like finding a marriage partner.  We know what we think we want and sometimes we find ourselves surprised: somehow we found it, or somehow our best efforts gave us the opposite of our goal and we just want to escape. 

Yet, with resources, time, and thoughtfulness, we can reach happiness in our work situation by trying many of them until we find the one that fits.  For me, this was medicine.  I knew I wanted to be a doctor and today I am one.  I am a chiropractor.  What I have done as a profession goes by many names: alternative medicine (alternative only because it is compared to allopathic medicine which is the fancy way of saying “uses medication and surgery”), natural healing (big secret revealed to all of my readers: all medicine is really methods to get the obstructions to health out of the way so that your body can get back to what it does: keeps you healthy.  No doctor is the source of your health – your body is your health and it functions without much thought by you or others), physical medicine (I move their body and assist my patients to move their body in a way to restore them to a proper musculoskeletal health).

One thing we can all admit, chiropractors need to be around people and if you are in this profession you had better both like people and want to be around them.  I contrast this with my wonderful sister-in-law who is in a career that is math-centered and admits to having a limited capacity to be around random people for long periods of time (but she states that she does like to be around her colleagues.  She is certainly not anti-social).

I, on the other hand, need to be around my patients, intensively, for around 40 minutes per patient visit.  Admittedly, this is not standard for chiropractors (or any kind of doctor). It is, simply, my preference for me and the way I practice chiropractic medicine.  For me to be happy in my chosen career, I need to practice this way.  To practice in any other way would, in my opinion, shortchange my patients of the care and rehabilitation I, through my training and experience, determine that they need.  To practice any other way would undermine my sense of happiness on the job.  As one might expect, I practice as a solo practitioner with a minimal staff.

Why does my seeing patient for around forty minutes mean that I must practice solo?  My previous employers in the field of chiropractic medicine were uncomfortable with my manner of practice.  I was told such things as “if you spend too much time with patients they will come to expect that amount of time (they do and that is one reason my patient tend to be loyal to me), “if you spend too much time with patients they will recover faster and that will impact on the office income” (yes, fewer visits will lead to less income – if medicine is something that should be broken down to a business model), “that is not how I practice” (and this is why I don’t work for you any longer), and, finally, “no one else practice like that (I opened an office in an area with six other chiropractors within 3 blocks yet I have carved out a niche for myself – by practicing in a way that my competitors do not).

This happiness article touches on the topic of work as one factor of controlling and impacting on your own happiness and being a doctor was what I knew was the only way I could be happy with my career choice.  This was not true for my twin brother who used to be an attorney and is presently training in the field of information science (which used to be called ‘library science’ but left that definition behind decades ag)) and works as a teacher and tutor. 

Or, it can be argued, he and I have a great deal in common with our career choices.  The word “doctor” does not mean “healer” despite the common notion that doctors are people you seek out for disease resolution.  The word doctor is closer to the definition of a college Ph.D. and in that respect it means “teacher”.  The original healers were people who were learned about the natural environment and were able to assist their patients in overcoming disease or infirmity.  In this respect, my brother and I are both teachers.

In contrast to my brother, I was not able to reach my career goal in my twenties by attending medical school and it took years and events for me to find myself in medical training at the age of 40.  Another lesson of happiness revealed: if you are unhappy it is up to you to change.  No one else can decide when reaching for happiness is not longer a feasible goal.  Maybe this decision is easy (leave your job and return to training to become what you want to be) or maybe it is hard (leave your spouse, stop supporting grown children, move away or distance yourself from your parents).  Only you can make the consideration and judgement as to what is within your capacity to handle.

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