The Secret of a Happy Life

Can we be healthy if we are not happy? Can we be happy if we are not healthy? Are the two totally linked? Can we choose ourselves?

Good questions! Perhaps exploring these questions is better served by watching and considering the following videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siWpDMUVSm0

This video was created by a 106-year-old gentleman

A 106-year-old man.
He lost his mother at five, his first wife at thirty-one, his business at fifty-eight, and his second wife just last year. By all logic, he should be the saddest man in Brooklyn. He isn’t.

This isn’t toxic positivity. This is someone who has endured profound loss — and still chooses joy.

Filmed in his Brooklyn apartment in January 2026, he asked that one simple message be shared: Stop waiting. Be happy now.

• First lesson: Hard times don’t have to make you hard. You get to choose what hard times make you.
• Second lesson: Stop caring what people think. Other people’s opinions can’t hurt you. Only you can hurt yourself by believing them. 
• Third lesson: You don’t NEED anything you don’t already have.
• Fourth lesson. Happiness is not at the end of something: Job, House, Money, Whatever. Happiness is right here, right now. In the things you already have. Though you have to open your eyes to see it. Most people walk right past it every single day. 

The second video for your consideration is my video What Is Health?

What are your thoughts?

If these videos stirred something in you, maybe you'd like to ponder these questions:

• What would change if you stopped waiting for happiness and allowed yourself to experience it now?
• Where in your life might joy be available, even alongside loss?
• What are you postponing that doesn’t actually need to wait?

Michael Lingard BSc (Econ). DO

TotalHealthMatters