When I was very young I remember feeling happy for no reason at all — just happy to be alive. Nowadays I try to feel it, but never succeed. Is there anyway I can learn how to get that beautiful feeling back?” asks 18-year-old Shraddha.

There are schools that teach you how to think, how to act, how to be a great engineer, lawyer or doctor, but there is no school in the world that teaches you how to feel. This is the core problem.
Society and all our great educationists don’t think that we ever need to re-learn how to feel. Emotion is something that we are supposed to know by birth, or something we should pick up as we go along. As a child you felt happy to be alive because that was your natural state of being. As you grew older, the world took over and you lost contact with your natural self. Now it’s almost impossible to get that pure emotion back.
The world teaches us to put aside pure emotion and pick up street emotions, which are satisfying for the moment. How easily can you feel jealousy?
I think it won’t be so tough. All you need is a better dressed girl of your age, better looking, with a handsomer boyfriend in her arm. The juices of envy will instantly shoot through your veins.
Try as you can, you won’t be able to stop it. How easy is it to feel mean and angry? Not tough at all. Some people I know have cultivated it so well that it’s their natural state of being. They can bitch for no reason at all.
An old time friend of mine takes pride in be-ing more hard and bitchy than anyone else in the business. That’s her USP. She believes that her core meanness brought her whatever success she got.
Being mean, pushy, self-serving, intensely selfish, these are emotions that are valued in the marketplace. It is supposed to keep us competitive and at the forefront. Society has very little space for gracious unselfishness or pure joy, so it’s a small wonder that the little happy person inside you has disappeared.
Feeling intense happiness at being alive… well, now that’s a pure emotion, but not supported by society. You’ve tried doing it.
You know you won’t be able to hold on to the emotion for more than a couple of seconds. You make a start and tell yourself, “I am so happy being alive,” but in a second, your mind will move on to other things.
Two minutes later you will have to remind yourself that you were trying to feel happy about being alive. You will again make a false start, and then, eventually give up. That’s ironically why we need calamities in our lives. We need tragic events to remind us that life is still so beautiful and miraculous.
But we are so messed up that even a disaster can make us feel the joy of being alive only for a few minutes. Then we are back to our usual miserable or, at best, neutral selves.
Here’s the key phrase — our neutral self. When we are left alone, we don’t feel much. At best we feel “okay”. This feeling of being “okay” has undone us. In truth, you have no right to feel just “okay,” you have to feel absolutely great about yourself. That’s the first step to changing the state of your neutral self.
Ask yourself, don’t you deserve to wake up each day and effortlessly feel that way? Why do you get satisfied by just feeling “okay”?
Write me your answer, whatever it is. This is too huge a topic. Let’s talk it over outside this column.