Rating others' happiness...

Last night as we were sitting on our stone bench, following a nice, long evening stroll, I suggested to my wife a game that consisted on rating the happiness level of people we knew. Something like giving points on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being totally happy. This was an eye-opening exercise. Sure, we were making some broad-stroke assumptions; we came up with a name, gave and compared our marks - all incredibly close - and moved on to the next...

The exercise was totally intuitive, we didn't even try to define was happiness should be; later on, during the night, I was thinking about some yardsticks like health, social life, wealth, but soon realized that the “real thing” was what went on between our two ears. This exercise opened up an exciting new subject that I intend to re-visit very soon. Isn't happiness after all the main reason while we hang on to dear life? You may wonder if we applied the test to ourselves and we sure did. Self-gratifying in fact; our own marks ended up much better than average!