The Pursuit Of Happiness
For most of us, happiness is a subjective non-measurable metric through which we evaluate the status of our lives. If we’re happy, our lives are going well. If we’re not happy, then something’s wrong. Most of us live in the pursuit of happiness. We define our current state of lives as “content” or “bearable” and point out umpteen changes that would lead to our happiness.
It’s hard being a happy person in our current world. You often face obstacles and you often get kicked down. Each time, you become more cynical and more critical. Hope becomes a word and you begin to doubt yourself. It becomes pretty easy to lose sight of your goal or to give up on it completely.
Yet, I’ll make a bold statement and say that most of our targets in life are trivial. Goals can come and go but once you start to lose hope and begin to doubt yourself, that’s when things start going bad. Unfortunately, I can’t find the right quote but it went along the lines of “You don’t lose when you fail. You lose when you quit!”.
A friend of mine in a new relationship is worried that being her boyfriend’s first girlfriend, he won’t know what it’s like to love her and might end up misinterpreting his feelings. I don’t know if there’s any truth behind her logic, but let’s apply it to our Pursuit of Happiness. How will we know that we’re finally “happy”? What defines happiness? What was the final change that made you say “I’m no longer content! I’m happy!”? And how do you know there’s another change that would make you say “NOW I’m happy. I was wrong to think I was happy before!”?
This entire theory is flawed. First of all, you’re not happy at the flip of a switch. There are varying degrees of happiness. You could be happy in situation A but even happier in situation B. It’s up to you to decide how much happiness you’ll gain from putting in the effort of changing your situation. To be scientific about this, you could perform a cost-benefit analysis. By evaluating the difference in happiness points and the duration of the additional happiness, you could decide whether it’s worth the energy.
***End***
Enough nerd-speak. Let’s break this down. The last paragraph really had nothing to do with anything I wanted to say except for the main point. “There are varying degrees of happiness”. As Sociology keeps trying to hammer home, people need to avoid “Binary Thinking”. Not all things can be classified as black or white, good or bad, etc. That’s a concept that I can agree with but for the sake or arguing (perish the thought that I admit I’m wrong), those classifications mainly arise when you complicate matters. If you can keep things simple (yes, my dreaded “Simplify” Theory), then it’s easier (not always) to evaluate things.
So, let’s define happiness again. I can’t speak for everyone here so I’ll use myself as the muse.
As your muse, I’ll start off by stating that I do not know what happiness is other than a feeling. Do I think I’m happy or do I feel that I’m merely content? I believe I’m happy! Yet, how did I arrive at this conclusion? If I look back over the past four months, do I see moments that would have deterred my happiness or contributed to it? Yes, I do. I see examples of both. Yet, here I am, declaring that I’m happy. Can I think of anything that I’d change over the past four months? Not really, no.
So far, I’ve been looking at my life as it is. Based on the current state of my life, I can conclude that I’m happy. As most of you know, I don’t like to deal with “What If?”s. So, maybe that contributes to my happiness. I don’t spend my time wondering about what I would do if I had better grades or if I had more money or if my entire family always got what they wanted.
I’ve been using an analogy of closed doors quite often, as of late. To place it in context, imagine yourself traversing a rectangular shaped box that has been divided into several rooms arranged linearly. This is your life. You’re going from one end to the other with no backtracking. Each time you pass a room, you MUST close the door behind you. I’m not saying this is how I live my life but let me apply it to my life. I tend to remain focused on what’s at hand and where I’m going. That is, I’m always dealing with what is in the room with me and with opening the next door. Each time I’m done with a room, I go through and I close the door. There’s no looking back. More rules are coming to mind to make this game more applicable to what I’m trying to say but I’ll forego them for the sake of simplicity.
Consider this with a person who keeps turning back to the past. Keeps opening the last door to reflect on how things were left in the last room. This person is spending their energy and time on looking at what lies behind them.
I realise the flaws. My style would mean I reach the end quickly… what then? I choke and die? But forget that. The main question is… is there anything wrong with reflecting on the past? No! Because you can learn from it and you can remember all the fond memories. Yet, once you start spending your time on the negatives. Wishing that you could change them – that’s when you’re falling into a pit. These are the “What if?s”.
I digress. Having said all that, what if I could change things in my life? I don’t know what I’d change. There are so many things that come to mind. Yet, I’ve made my peace with them. So my answer would be that I’d change nothing! And that’s why I can claim I’m happy! When both my “As Is” and my “What If?” lives are the same, then it’s supporting evidence of my happiness.
I’m well aware that there are scenarios out there that I’m not considering. As “Bundar” kept trying to convince me yesterday, I was potentially depriving myself of additional happiness based on a decision I had made. Yet, if we work on the concept of degrees of happiness, then I could spend my entire life making decisions that I believe would make me happier and then potentially ruing missed opportunities or wrong decisions.
Although I could have made this point immediately, it would have ended up an extremely short blog. The problem is not that we pursue happiness. The problem is that we don’t accept happiness. We’re almost always looking for that little bit more. We don’t want to settle. Call it greed or call it high standards. We need to realise that what we have is more than what most people in the world have. We need to realise that spending our entire lives going for that extra few points is not what is going to make us happy. In the end, it’s being satisfied with what you have.
“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” - Guillaume Apollinaire
