There’s more to life than being happy | Emily Esfahani Smith | Day 52 of 100 Days 100 Thoughts

Hello Folks !!!

This is another beautiful, thoughtful, and interesting TED Talk I enjoyed watching. Carpe Diem, seize the day is the motto most of us follow and we want to be happy in our lives. But are we happy? Are we chasing happiness? If that’s the case are we getting what we wanted? Emily Esfahani Smith in this wonderful talk titled “There’s more to life than being happy” talks in detail about why chasing happiness is not the right way to go about it and having meaning in life. Watch this TED Talk without any delay.

Welcome Back !!!

In this talk, Emily says that Having meaning in life makes a huge difference. Having a meaningful life is much more than a happy life. This line is much more fascinating and looks cool to say too but what exactly it says? Emily explains that there are four pillars of meaningful life. They are belonging, purpose, transcendence, and storytelling. 

I am not going to talk in detail about belonging, purpose, and transcendence but rather I want to talk about one important thing of all – storytelling. Humans differs from other species mainly by one important aspect called storytelling. We grew up on listening to stories, we can’t live without saying stories. And the biggest and the most important story we want to say is our life. We all are the Edward Bloom from the movie Big Fish, we all create our stories and that story makes our life interesting to us. That story gives us a meaning, that process of creating our story gives us purpose, and the process of carving every moment in the story takes us to transcendence.

We live our stories, we carve out our narrative and we explore our lives. All the other three pillars in a way comes from our need to create a story. A story we want for us and us alone.