Welcome!

Hi, my name is Daniel Cohen and I want to welcome you to my blog, Happiness and Humility.  As you’ll see from the “About Me” page and some of the posts you read, I not only want you to leave the blog both happier and more humble, I like to have fun when I write, (noting, for instance, that my ego could successfully apply for Statehood).  For now, let me share with you why I chose the title “Happiness and Humility.”

1:  Humility is the key to true happiness NOW more than ever, as it alone is the antidote to the selfishness and self-consciousness that lie at the root of modern Mankind’s anxiety and depression. 

2:  Happiness is very important – and humility is more important still.

3:  Happiness makes it easier to be humble. 

The Relation of Happiness to Humility

I named this blog “Happiness and Humility” for several reasons.

Reason #1:  Humility is the key to true happiness NOW more than ever, as it alone is the antidote to the selfishness and self-consciousness that lie at the root of modern Mankind’s anxiety and depression. While most of us appreciate humility in our friends and family, Society tends to push worldly success as the way to “make us happy.” This is a myth.  A myth designed to get us to buy new things in order to keep up with the Joneses and the Kardashians.  Yet studies show that external success is only one-tenth of what makes us happy, while a whopping 40 percent has to do with our internal attitude.  An attitude we can improve by developing humility and practicing proven happiness-enhancing techniques. 

Put simply, instead of seeking to get more to appreciate, humility helps us appreciate what we already have more.  This doesn’t mean we stop striving to reach our goals.  Nor does it necessarily mean we forego smart phones and big screen TVs, savoring Thai food or going shoe shopping.  It means we put this stuff in its proper perspective.

As we’ll discuss in future posts, gaining proper perspective is not easy in a society that has us asking ourselves the two questions that lead to our selfishness and self-consciousness.  The first question — “What can I get out of life – and am I getting enough?” — is responsible for our selfishness, while the second question — “What do others think of me?” — is the root of our self-consciousness.  As we’ll see, these two questions come about as a matter or course in a Consumerism-based world where we’ve been programmed to believe material wealth leads to happiness.

Reason #2:  Happiness is very important – but humility is more important still. Most would agree that we pursue wealth, careers and relationships in order to achieve happiness.  That happiness is the most important thing in our lives.  Our culture promotes individual happiness through getting things to “make us happy.”  As such, we respect happiness more than humility, which gets stigmatized as weakness when it is actually strength.

While it’s true that happiness is more important than the means we use to achieve it, humility is more important than happiness.  For not only will humility make you happy, your humility will make those around you happy and, finally, your humility will make God happy.

Just how will humility make you happier?  Humility for me is three things:  1) putting yourself in perspective, b) accepting what you DON’T like about life and c) being thankful for what you DO like.  As we’ll discover, when we put ourselves in perspective, it takes all the pressure of feeling that the world revolves around us off.  Accepting what we don’t like about life gives us the freedom to be happy even when things don’t go our way.  And the more thankful we can be for the things we already have, the happier we become.

What God has revealed to me over the course of the last decade of writing and preaching on the topic is that there are scores of paths to humility, all of which fall into these three categories, and that different paths, or ways of thinking, can help us with different situations we face in life.  These paths are what this blog is all about.

Reason #3:  Happiness makes it easier to be humble.  While most of my posts will in some way be related to a broad definition of humility, I will sometimes post tips on happiness for happiness’ sake.  Not only because I want you to be happy, but because it is much easier to be humble when you’re happy than when you are miserable.