One cannot simply decide to be a happy person, and just because you are, does not mean that everyone else chooses not to be. No emotion is 100% controllable, anyone who tells you this is most likely a bullsh*t self-help guru.

Now, I’m not saying that this (looking at the positives and such) can’t work for some people, but usually that’s no where near good enough. There are SO many factors which could be bringing a person down (ALL of which may be valid) that you can never just generalize and put everyone in the same box. A person with a bad job may not have the time, resources, or may have significant others depending on him/her to bring in a steady paycheck. A person who stuck in a bad relationship may have a number of reasons to stick around. Perhaps they don’t think they can do any better (not saying this is the case, but that’s how they may feel), or maybe the relationship is an abusive one. Abusive relationships are extremely complicated and no matter how strongly you feel about it, unless you’re a part of one, you can’t possibly understand what it feels like. A person who (you believe) is making stupid choices may also have a number of reasons why they do so. If we’re talking about school aged children, then maybe hormones are running amok in this person’s head. Or maybe there’s a difficult home environment (or school environment) which the person is coping with by acting out. How could YOU possibly know? Unless you’ve decided to pigeonhole everyone.

And then there’s the overarching societal reasons why a person may be feeling unhappy. For instance, did you know that people are not designed to live in such close proximity to each other? Cities, towns, tribes, and so on all progressed from the original group setting: hunter-gatherers. If you look at some of the still existing hunter-gatherer societies you’ll notice that there some places with enough space to section off about a square mile per person. A LOT of the issues that people face in contemporary society (like depression) are thought to be the result of congestion-related stress.

Now, whether or not that’s entirely true, we can’t tell for sure because conducting experiments of that nature are unethical without consent, and not many people are going to want to give consent to have their societal framework utterly altered. But much naturalistic observation has been done on people living in hunter-gatherer settings and as long as they remain that way without tampering from outside sources (organized societies like ours) they are usually completely devoid of many problems that plague ordinary societies (like depression, rape, pedophilia, sex/race inequalities).

So, I guess, in answer to your question-there is no definitive way to be happy. You can generally educate people though, educate them so that they don’t subscribe to ignorant notions. Educate them about human psychology, make an intro to sociology class a school requirement. At least then, kids will understand why they feel the way they do. But the notion that one can teach happiness is inherently ridiculous.

I know this might seem hard to understand for a happy-go-lucky girl like you, but a skeptical and pessimistic view on life has its advantages as well, and frankly I would rather be a tad pessimistic and unhappy, then to jump around in euphoria all day like a mindless idiot.