“You say potato, I say potahto”.
You can define Happiness by different words. Recently, I had two different vivid discussions about a topic we both agreed on. The problem is that we called the same concepts with other words, hence the debate.
In the first case, we talked about the “meaning of life” or what I called it. Another person called in “goal of life” or “living life with intensity.”
In the second case, we were talking about “happiness.” When I told him what I thought about the topic, he, in turn, said to me that I was wrong. His reason was that it is not “Happiness” that people want, but “Joy”… You can probably imagine that people can get a bit tense up, especially when they are accused of not knowing something they are supposed to know a lot about, a topic in which they take special pride as well. But in the case too, it was again the problem of terminology.
Sounds very innocent. But you can also probably imagine how a simple disagreement can escalate into a full-blown discussion or worst. Take, for example, what happens with religion. We can generally agree that all religions’ purpose is to search for spiritual growth, happy, and personal individual, which is to say that all religion has a positive intention. The problem starts when people start to insist on terminology and even get violent by doing so.
Or take war, where two 18 y.o.s are shooting at each other. In principle, there is no difference between them. They are both human beings protecting terminology, which both sides claim to be correct.
So while words have the power to kill and destroy, they can also be used to build and create. And while we are all trying to achieve growth and improvement in one form or another, let’s agree that we may have different terminology, but the end should be improving the human condition. This is a noble goal to strive for, so let’s treat others as our allies and try to understand them before trying to be understood.
