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The Pursuit of Happiness
I’ve always had a rocky relationship with the idea of happiness. The actual practice of it is even harder. But whatever the case, it seems that almost everybody has something to say about it.
Talking to some people, you’d get the idea happiness is an internal discipline, that you can simply “choose good feelings for no reason.”
The notion of happiness is even somehow indelibly mixed up in the founding of our country. The Declaration of Independence reads:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
They go on to suggest governments are instituted in order to protect our right to pursue happiness. But what exactly does that mean? Why should we pursue happiness? It’s one of those things that seems to just be a given for most people. You ask them what they want out of life and 9 times out of 10, they’ll say “Happy!”
Happy Birthday. Happy Anniversary. Happy Fourth of July. We wish it on everybody and on ourselves all the time. Okay, well not all the time:
I want to be happy, but not all the time.
That’s from a song called “A Good Woman is Hard to Find” by the band Morphine. And I guess that’s closer to where I stand on the matter. There was actually a good speech given by one of the characters (I forget who) in a recent episode of South Park that I caught a few minutes of. He had just been dumped by his girlfriend and was crying when a group of kids came by, and he explained to them that even though he was sad, he was happy that he was able to be moved so deeply by someone or something that it could make him sad. Though I don’t always like or agree with what that show’s all about, that seemed like a pretty solid moral. Far more nuanced and beautiful than a Christian family show my roomate was just watching where a priest was giving a homily about whether or not it was morally acceptable to spend “found money.” Please, no wonder Christianity is in such a crisis right now. It’s not answering remotely meaningful questions (at least not on tv it’s not) and is instead leaving questions about the meaning of life up to cartoons… and, er, websites I guess.
The four part BBC documentary, the Century of the Self also has a ton of meaningful things to say about happiness - or rather our pursuit of it. It chronicles various strains of thought over the last century about how best to engage ourselves in pursuing this most elusive prey. On the one end are the Freudians who preach self-denial and restraint, followed by disciples of Wilhelm Reich was thought it best to “let it all hang out.” Letting it all hang out though is exactly what lead us to where we seem to be now in this country and in the world. By embracing our desires completely we have welcomed a host of parasitic corporate organisms into our lives to satisfy those desires with props, costumes and mental constructs. We become addicted to the idea that we need to be happy at all times and that if we’re not, then we’re doing something deadly wrong. We might not even be - gasp! - Good Americans.
So are we to follow the noble Eightfold Path away from our desires? Not only from our desires to purchase products, but from our desire even towards happiness itself? I don’t know. But I do know that in my own life, what I want is not increased leisure time. I don’t want to pursue happiness at all costs. I don’t want to get bogged down in a lopsided and impossible caricature of humanity. What I want is to know with absolute certainty that my life has purpose. What I want is to experience life in it’s fullest. This seems to mean in addition to happiness, satisfaction and pleasure also anxiety and depression and soul-wrenching anguish of the first order.
Oddly though, I think you can also become addicted to feeling bad, to the inwardly heroic nature of those struggles. The martyr complex. The need to carry the weight of others or of the world on your shoulders at all times. You end up choosing to feel bad for no reason. You end up paddling around in a tidal pool of a much larger ocean.
I wonder, then, if the answer is simply to choose to FEEL. Period. To allow things to touch and move you deeply in whatever direction they do. To choose life in all its thorny glory over your own sanitized fantasies of what it should or could be. That, to me, seems like the ultimate internal discipline. The ultimate choice made for no reason. Life is it’s own reason. Is no reason. Is. Life?
- Loneliness > Teamwork > lllumination
- Sam Adams on Natural Rights
- She Seems Happy Enough…
- Gone to Croatoan
- Virginia Declaration of Rights
- Prev: FeedBurner Nixed
- Next: Pasiphae & the Bull
June 14th, 2006 at 1:50 am
“If we are never sad, then how do we know when we’re happy?”
I can’t remember where that quote comes from, but I like it.
June 14th, 2006 at 5:34 am
ah no, humans spend most of their life actively seeking UNhappiness. that makes them happy.
don’t believe me?
i unreservedly recommend any menschenkenner save himself a few years of thought and buy this book:
The Situation Is Hopeless, but Not Serious
–The Pursuit of Unhappiness–
June 14th, 2006 at 7:27 am
i have to qualify my statement about “choosing good feelings for no reason”. this phrase is a sort of nlp joke really. it is a logical trap in that it is all the reasoning that gets us into a state of not doing things. if we can get outside of reason for a moment and use some methods that we are consciously aware of to generate good feelings then we can move towards making better choices now.
we live in a consumer society and we need money to survive. a fair amount of our time is spent in getting money, or getting the means to get money……….so if there are simple sound methods for becoming more effiecient in that task, wouldn`t our lives improve?
happy? we have to look at what happy means. to some happy means comfortable, to some happy means motivated, to some happy means miserable, so what we need to do first is to discover what we mean personally by happy. only then will we be able to move toward the state that we personally know as happy.
June 14th, 2006 at 9:46 am
I liked it when Dennis Leary said in his No Cure for Cancer tour, that happiness comes in very small doses: a bite of a chocolate chip cookie, a drag on a cigarette.
Have you ever read Sark? I think her stuff is mainly for women, but I’ve heard her speak on NPR and she’s a pretty amazing person. Her point is basically that if you want to be happy, then just accept your life the way it is, and just try and be happy with it. But if you want something else–like to fight for a cause, to have a new house, whatever, you should know that those things will not make you happy–just a cause and a house.
In my metaphysical studies, I’ve found that no matter what people pursue–happiness or celebrity or money–they will just keep running into the same personality quagmires in new clothes.
You’re better off with the cookie or cigarette.
June 14th, 2006 at 11:58 am
I think I relate so well to your posts because a lot of your thoughts and beliefs (or if you take offense to that word, allow me to rephrase it with ‘ideas’) remind me, in no small way, of Joss Whedon’s. He came off as an atheist in interviews, and a fairly staunch one at that, but the concepts and themes he incorporated into his shows were undeniably profound. He applied spiritual truths to story-telling in practical, everyday situations (albeit set in mythical scenarios, such as space or the mouth of Hell) …and whether or not you yourself are a fan of Buffy or Firefly, I think Joss Whedon is pretty much a genius and you seem to take after him in many regards.
In otherwords, write a television series!
June 14th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Haha. Okay, simple as that!
June 14th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
yes we do have to face our self eventually. all the having and doing just postpone the inevitable. i teach the generation of peak states and happiness falls into that catagory. people who find a simple happiness inside tend to not persist in abusive behaviours and types of thinking. the more you choose good feelings the less room there is for the other less positive ones.
method:
remember a good, fun, passionate memory from your past. build p the image in your mind in terms of wht you saw, what you heard and what you did and possibly tasted and smelled too. really focus on the textures of colour, sound, volume, brightness and intensity as you relive this experience and notice how you feel the things you remember feeling when you first experienced the event.
the better you become at recreating this memory the beeter you will become at re-installing this feeling for continued use.
this is the reason we put pictures of loved ones on our desk.
our feelings are our reality.
June 14th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
I think I’d rather have a cause than be happy, if it came to a hard choice between them.
What’s more important, to get something worthwhile achieved, or to waste your life away being dumb and grinning?
June 14th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
it doesn`t have to be a choice. you are the one who makes the distinction by asking the question and putting grinning and dumb together as if they are inseperable. some of the wisest, most intelligent, capable and spiritual people smile all the time. i merely point out distinctions and suggest flexibility. at the end of the day we all make our own reality by the choices we make.
happiness is a part of that.
June 14th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
This is such a weak statement that I can’t help but call you on it, even though I know it’s mostly irrelavent to your main point.
Reichian therapy isn’t about “letting it all hang out”, at least not in the way you mean it here. It’s about removing blockages of sexual energy (among other things, but this is primary.) Reich posited (along with the Chinese and Hindu internal alchemists) that sexuality, when blocked by feelings of shame and repression, manifests not just psychologically, but also physically, as a malady, and becomes concentrated in certain locations of the body which are often evidenced by latent aches or muscular tension.
If the American mentality concerning sex and indulgence was at all educated by Reichian therapy, we’d probably be much healthier than we are now. America’s sickness isn’t “letting it all hang out” — it’s not a lack of order that is deadening our senses and making us sick and unhappy.
June 14th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Well I see what you’re saying. And I certainly shorthanded and probably distorted the whole thing - But in the context of the BBC documentary, this is pretty much *exactly* what they try to conclude. Check it out. Well, to be more accurate, they show how well-meaning people after the model of Reich tried to open doors for people, which corporations then realized they could use these newly open doors to stuff full of products via lifestyle marketing
February 13th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
[…] There is no wrong poetry. But there is bad poetry. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy it or that it doesn’t still accurately reflect a particular person’s experience. Sisoris Hoyd rubs his hands together in delight from the back room. From the kitchen rise the muffled cries of cocks being beheaded. “I want to be happy but not all the time.” Someday they’ll find a cure for pain. Someday we’ll appreciate the goddamned rain. Someday when the flowers come up we will rejoice once again. […]