What is making us unhappy?

What truly makes us happy?
What can we do to be happier?

Everyday, we're thinking about things like this. I have to admit, I am a pessimistic person.
If you follow me on twitter, you should know that about 80% of my tweets are negative. Yes, angry tweets, sad tweets, rants and complains. I can't even be sure that the leftover 20% are all my happy tweets. 

One day, a friend asked me, "Peishi, why are you always so happy?"
I was a bit surprised because I never thought that I will come off as an optimistic and cheerful person to anybody. I complain about almost everything.

Most of my friends call me "Raging Kid" because I get pissed off with things easily, but somehow, I forget about it in a minute.
My followers always ask me things like "Why are you always #Foreveralone?" because I always tweet about how lonely I am when I don't have anyone to talk to, especially when I am feeling down.

I want to come off as an optimistic and cheerful person to everyone.
I thought about this and gathered a few points of what is making me unhappy. If I strike them off one by one, I will definitely be a happier person. 

1) Self-Pity

Yes, I am EXTREMELY guilty of this because I feel sorry for myself ALL THE TIME.
Admit it, I know you are guilty of this too!
When you're feeling down and nobody is there to cheer you up...
"Why am I always there for someone when they are down, but nobody's here for me when I am down?!" 

If we were to stop feeling sorry for ourselves, we will be less unhappy.

Let go of the past.
If we were to let go of the past, we'll get to enjoy what we have now and forget about things that we can never retrieve.

"Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, and today is a gift, which is why it is called present."

Sometimes, we see the past as something so important that we forget about the present, which brings me to my next point.

2) Taking things for granted

Some things happen so naturally that we tend to take them for granted.
Nothing is forced to work this way.
We don't get what we have now just because we deserve to have it.

"If a fellow isn’t thankful for what he’s got, he isn’t likely to be thankful for what he’s going to get."
-Frank A. Clark

Take things for granted and one day, everything we took for granted will be gone.

One day, I was feeling extremely down and I thought pretty much everything was against me.
I talked to a friend about this and this is what she said, "Be grateful. Think happy! Look around you and think about what you have!"
Like always, I wasn't sure if it will work. Most of the time, I won't listen to advices because when I'm down, I think nobody can understand how I exactly feel since they are not in my 'plight'.
However, that day, I didn't want my friend to worry about my problems so I typed out what I am grateful for, to her.

"I am grateful for having a pair of eyes, a nose, a mouth, a pair of ears, hands and legs that are working fine."
"I am grateful to have a perfect family."
"I am grateful to have a blog for me to record all my memories down."
"I am grateful to have all the things that I bought." ...

So I stated things that I am grateful for, one by one, and gradually, I felt like the happiest person on earth. Somehow, stating things that you feel grateful for will force you to think about the good things you have around you. 

Learn to be grateful and we will think that everything that happened to us is special.
When we think everything that we have is special, we will in turn, be happier.

3) Expectations

We all expect so much in life.
There's this saying in Chinese - “希望越大，失望越大。”
It means, the more you expect, the more disappointed you will be.

"If you expect nothing, you will never be disappointed."

We all want to be better. Better than anybody else.
However, we know that it is not possible, or it is way too difficult for most of us to achieve that because there will always be someone better.
We have such high expectations, and when we cannot do what we expected to, we get disappointment.

Expectations improve us, but they also make us greedy.

We expect so much from something, and when we get what we expected, we expect more.

We want to be better so that we can be happier.
All the time, we expect a lot just for happiness.

Think about it, if we expect so much in life just to be happy, why don't we expect nothing, or lesser, so we will never be disappointed?
Disappointment makes us unhappy and with no disappointment, we will not be unhappy.

Those are what I thought is making me unhappy.
You don't have to listen to what I say. After all, we are the people who deal with our own happiness and unhappiness.

I think happiness is contagious. When you are happy, you'll spread the happiness to many other people as well.

When you smile, I smile! :D

Happiness is simple.

I hope you like this post, I spent a lot of time on this because I'm not very good in English and I'm bad with words. That is probably the reason why I rarely do posts like this!
Anyway, spread the love, xoxo.