Donkey Kong approach to happiness

There's a Bangla saying that loosely translates as this: Trust begets Luck/Fortune, arguing gets you nowhere. When it comes to happiness, I believe this mantra is applicable to me.

I wouldn't call me a micro level happy person. I worry about details, future, people I love, small things. I obsess over things that I don't have control over. I roll my eyes at the people who make grand proclamations about how they feel simply because I don't understand that kind of feeling. What's the point in updating your FB or Twitter declaring how much you love someone, or something, or how life doesn't get better than this. I love people, things and my life is often really super. But on a grand level? Nah, that's just not me. The Creator forgot to put some microchips in my brain to feel grand emotions. Except maybe when they are in the big screen.

I get the big moments in a movie, and often it sweeps me away in their own way. I'll give you several examples:

• In My Cousin Vinny, when the Judge throws out the case with a hammer, 
• In It Could Happen to You, when Bridget Fonda goes through several emotions after hearing that she won the lotto, 
• When the light hits Geena Davis at the end of the movie as she realizes what she needs to do, and her face suddenly lights up from the cloud
• In Just like heaven, Mark Ruffalo suddenly realizes that the apparition he fell in love with, in her alive incarnation doesn't remember how he feels, and now he needs to walk away.

So, safe to say, I can deal with them when they are away from me, on a removed medium, where it's safe for me to experience it without consequence.

But here's the dichotomy. Lately, I've been hanging out with people with a lot of misgivings. Both on the work and the personal front, I'm encountering people who are so weighed down with Life (with capital L) that it's pointless to cheer them up. There's someone I met up with recently who went from one crisis to another in the span of 4 minutes, and then when I tried to crack a joke, looked as if it's a crime to laugh in the face of adversity.

Now back to the title. In the classic 80s videogame, Mario jumps through one obstacle through another to get to the final level. And most people I meet do that, they go from one place to another, jumping through obstacles. I feel that I do the opposite, I go from one point of happiness to another, once in a while falling into a despair trap, but knowing that I'll get up again.

Which approach is better? I'd argue that once you focus on the happiness points, you focus on getting to happiness. Rather, if you look at your life, and see only obstacles to overcome, you focus on the negative experiences.

I'll know more in 20 years, stay tuned :-)