The subject of happiness and hope in mathematics

My life has almost been monotonous, but I'm heavily reliant on reading novels to keep myself occupied and creating more colourful images in my head. 

I've recently stumbled upon this mathematical formula during the read of my new novel (actually, it's just a day or two ago), and believe it's a good reminder to everyone, readers and myself included: 

Happiness = Reality / Expectation

There are two ways to be happy (a high quotient).

1. Improve your reality (to have a higher numerator) 
2. Lower your expectations (to have a lower denominator) 

But upon reading further into the novel, there's another way that the equation could remind us of:

Hope = Expectation / Reality 

This is in assumption that reality is constant.

Expectation had to be greater than reality to create optimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, a fraction of diminishing returns. 

The human condition had meant that this number approached zero without reaching it -- you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at any provocation.

Someone who was happy would have little need to hope for change. But conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality.

** This post is all inspired by the novel, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. 

Click read more for my reflection.

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In all honesty, my reality is not great, albeit not the worst, but my relatively frequent relapses are making me lose hope and faith gradually with each month. The rate of improvement is nearly negative. Praying is almost deemed useless at my own part.

Reality and hope aside, all these go back to expectation.

My self-expectation is really high. I'd expected myself to be the best in everything, in health, independence, intelligence, career, love life and much more down the list. But now I'm down to nothing. My career ain't making me smarter but instead stupider, as I'm the slave and robot to almost everyone at work in almost all possible ways.

Hence, I'll need to achieve for higher happiness and hope quotients for my speedy recovery.

Now I need to build them all over again.