Happy New Year! Why?

Bushwicklifenew yorknew york citypersonalphotographyportraitsSenior CenterthoughtsUncategorized

Jan 2

Another year has come to an end and 2013 has arrived.I spent quite some time thinking about the reason why we wish each other a Happy New Year on January 1st today.Happiness is quite underrated in our society. I've been living in New York City for 16 years, I've been to hundreds of parties and met thousands of people since I came here. The question that I was usually asked first when I met somebody new was "what do you do?", the second one "where do you live?" and the third one "how big is your apartment?" Not once meeting all these people in all these years did anybody ever ask me "are you happy?".But on New Year's things are different. On this day we don't value what we usually value in Western society. We don't say "Money New Year!", "Career New Year!", "Success New Year!" or "Sex New Year!". This time we wish each other to be happy.Why? And why on the remaining 364 days of the year we focus so much time and effort on money, career, success and sex without asking ourselves and others, "are we happy?"