5 Simple Ways to Live a Happy Life
By: Lokajit Tikayatray
Tags: Jon Jandai, Life Lessons, Happiness, Simple Living, Self Improvement

3. Follow sustainable living practices

“The countries with a higher Sustainable Development Goal Index score tend to do better in terms of the subjective well-being of their citizens.”, states the Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being report.

Sustainable living practice proposes to live in a way where we can satisfy our current needs without compromising the needs of our future.

Today we are so engrossed in consuming everything available to us that we don’t consider how long we can sustain with the current speed of consumption. We don’t think about how hard we work to produce the materials that we consume.

According to Jon Jandai — We work too much until we kill everything that supports us. Today we cannot drink normal water. We buy water. We work more than eight hours per day. We are digging up minerals and using them up. The more we work, the more we are using up the natural resources. We say we are working for our kids but what are we leaving for them?

Nowadays, we extract as many natural resources we possibly can to make more money.

With time the basic necessities are becoming costlier as we are having fewer and fewer resources available. So, we have to work harder to make money in order to pay for things that were naturally available to us for free.

To lead a happy life, we need to reign in the mindless usage of resources. The sensible consumption model will help us save money and also retain our reserves for a longer period. It will enable us to leave a better environment for our future generations.

The less money we need, the lesser we have to work to earn it; the happier our lives will become.

How to apply it:

Buy food from people who follow sustainable farming practices.

Be mindful of the usage of water and electricity at your home and offices.

Use public transport wherever available.

Recycle as much possible.

4. Be self-reliant

Being Self-reliant means, we are dependent on resources that we grow ourselves or grown by our neighbors and friends. We rely on other people in our community to fulfill our basic necessities, and in turn, they depend on us for the same.

According to Jon Jandai — Self-reliance is not about doing everything by ourselves without relying on people, money, or technology. We need to rely on natural resources and also on technology. But use money and technology with mindfulness. Use it because it is necessary and not because you like it. The money can collapse but not your value system which is dependent on other humans. Self-reliance is more fun, easy, and secure than anything else on this earth.

Today we are heavily reliant on big companies for our need for food, clothing, technology, and other necessities. But these big corporations are not dependent on us. This one-way dependency model creates an uneven relationship that helps the corporations to control our lives and our behavior.

The more we remove our reliance on the big companies, the less they will be able to regulate us.

One way of doing that is to support small businesses and individual entrepreneurs. By supporting each other in our communities, we will be able to become self-reliant.

We will feel secure and confident because we are dependent on a system that depends back on us.

How to apply it: