Happily Ever After!

“And they lived happily ever after”

What does that remind you? Cinderella? Snow White? Any other fairy-tale? I’m sure it’s only in fairy tales that we see a phrase like that. And the reason is simple, because the phrase in itself is quite an imaginary thing.

When we start out moulding our lives, we have a goal in mind. The goal is pretty simple, “A happy future”. But as we live life second by second, we are forced to rethink this goal of ours.


And when some of us change the definition of ‘future’, some of us redefine ‘happy’ for ourselves.  And some of us might even adapt a hybrid version of the two new definitions. For all kinds of us, every decision is a weighted beam balance between now and tomorrow (now being immediate future and tomorrow being the farther future). We decide to do whatever the balance tells us to do. And the balance isn’t the same for everyone, it can be biased and it mostly is.

Shrinking the Future

So, for the people among us who change the definition of ‘future’, the term generally changes to a much shorter span of time. Years become months, months become weeks. It generally becomes something like “the objective of life today is to have a happy month.” or “The objective of life today is to earn enough money to get myself an iPod.” We very well know that a month is gonna pass by and after that there’s no saying what life has in store for us after that. And we very well know that an iPod has a life-time for which it can entertain us, after which it has to be replaced by something better.

When we consider that the term ‘future’ is more immediate than we initially thought it was, we naturally set new goals for ourselves and seek new, more efficient methods to achieve our goal. When the goal is to save money for an iPod, I am not going to invest that money in a Fund. It just doesn’t make sense. The balance in this case is heavily biased towards now.

I am Happy, in my own way!

For the other kind of us, people who redefine happy for ourselves, it is a bit trickier. The same iPod can make us happy, but the real happy is more likely to be saving for the future. So, this sort of a person would generally invest in funds, chits and what not. It makes sense for them to have a big balance in the bank, heavier pockets and lighter back-packs. Having a laptop of the best config isn’t their best tonic. They would rather sit at home and watch a 15 year old television set than spend money and watch the same show live. In this case, the balance is biased towards tomorrow.

The hybrid

Neither here, nor there, the hybrids among us tend to save a little and blast off with the rest. In a sense, most of us are hybrids. I am a hybrid. I’d rather save money to go on a trip next month than buy a pen-drive this very instant. But, if I have to decide between saving for buying my own house and getting a home-theater system for my room, I’d go with the latter. It is a matter of the distance in the future. Most of us have this sense of a threshold. This is the threshold that dictates to us whether saving for such a far away thing makes sense. And it is this threshold that our beam balance follows when telling us what decisions to make.

The geographic divide

This generalization might be invalid and inapplicable to some of us, but it’s a pretty fair thing to generalise upon. Based on my observation, I see that the western society has a much more “shrink the future” approach to life. But the eastern society takes up the other option. This trend of the eastern society choosing to “save for the future” is somehow more applicable to the older generations of our society. I see the younger generations in the east inclining more towards the hybrid definition with a shorter future in mind. It can never be said if anyone’s attitude towards this is right or wrong. Life is unpredictable and can be long or short. And decisions we make today will most definitely affect the tomorrow we live in.

The approach to relationships

I have mostly dwelled on monetary decisions we make. But this classification is pretty much applicable to all our relationships too. And this we see in the Indian society where marriage is a long-lasting phenomenon and ‘sacrifice’ for the well-being of the family is more profound. Whereas, we see that the younger generations have a different approach to the whole concept of relationships, with “breaking up” being a more acceptable incident. We see that the Western society has been long in acceptance of divorce and relationships falling off.

“Forever” is mythical

Whatever be the approach we have towards life, it is pretty evident that ‘forever’ is a myth. There is nothing quite certain in our lives and we tend to get heart-broken whenever we expect things to last forever. Things change, other people change and we too change. And thus, it’d be in our interest to avoid thinking too much ahead of ourselves as far possible. I would love to conclude by saying that though tomorrow is what we live for, today is what we live in. And our responsibility is to make tomorrow as happy for ourselves as possible by living today as happily as possible.