Note that the title doesn't say path TO happiness, so don't expect to find any guidelines on how to be happy, if I knew that I'd be filthy rich and probably wouldn't be writing this. What I am going to write about is what I believe is the mechanism of happiness. What are the requirements of being happy?
I think that happiness is based on our needs and whether they are satisfied or not. A person is truly, absolutely, 100 percent happy when all of his or her needs are satisfied. When some are and some aren't then the person is partially happy. Now, there are two possible ways to achieve this theoretical complete happiness. One is by satisfying your every need one has and the other is getting rid of them.
Nowadays, people living in developed countries have almost infinite number of different needs, but they also have the same amount of possibilities and means to satisfy them. But what we don't have is infinite time. Therefore it is impossible to reach complete happiness in our society this way. However, partial happiness is achievable by satisfying the most important needs we have, such as hunger, tiredness, comfortable life, feeling of belonging and of course, love. After satisfying the important ones, surely secondary ones will be brought up to make us miserable, but as they mean less to us, we can still feel ourselves at least a bit happy.
Now, the other way achieving complete happiness is to reduce the number of needs to absolute minimum until the need of existence. I believe that is something Indian religions call nirvana. This, however, requires enormous amount of dedication and willpower and even then, reaching the result is not certain. But the idea of reducing the needs stays.
What could the practical approach be then? As neither of the options alone is unreachable for an average joe, then what about combining them into one? We should satisfy the needs which are quite impossible to be free of. We should eat, sleep, love each other and satisfy everything else, which are very important for our well-being and for which we have time, meanwhile trying to get rid of the secondary ones, which would otherwise stay preventing us from being happy. I believe that by applying this idea, one could live reasonably happy life.
This has got me thinking, whether it wouldn't be better if I was born in some of the developing countries, where I would never have many of the secondary needs I have here, like the need for internet and everything it contains, television, tasty food and so on. It would be much easier for me to be happy, since huge amount of my needs never existed and the number, which I would have to be dealing with is much smaller, wouldn't it? No, because I could lack the means for satisfying my main needs, which would make me far more miserable. So it's a beak down, tail loose situation, where neither one has an easier way of reaching happiness than the other.
As I said in the introduction, this is not a guide on how to reach happiness. It lacks direct instructions and doesn't count in the difficulties one might have during the process. But it is a general idea of what happiness could be and what it takes to be happy. Something thoughticious for a day.
First of all, the methods of reaching happiness appear to be extremely similar, they both try to shrink the amount of needs that cause unhappiness - one by ignoring the lesser needs (hence they are no longer *needs*), the other one by declassifying the lesser needs as *needs*. The second approach simply takes the idea further by defining the number of lesser needs that require to be 'deneedified'. The result is basically approach number one - satisfying the main needs and ignoring the lesser needs that cause unhappiness. As a corollary, the conclusion repeats the first theory, which is already partly repeated in the second theory.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, the question of 'what is happiness?' is something that intrigues me much more. By your definition, being happy and being content are the same, yet for some reason being happy is considered somehow superior. After all, being content means that there is nothing that would cause distress or unhappiness, yet there are no needs that are overly satisfied - a golden middle, so to say. Thus, the question remains. Perhaps happiness is more than merely being content with your needs being cared for, perhaps happiness requires something extra. In my very humble opinion, it does.
As for the question whether or not we can ever reach true happiness, I guess we will have to wait and see if we succeed in reaching it. Not that we would know when it hits us, but we might notice when it has already arrived.
The first and second method are different. Think of a bowl filled with apples of which each one you can eat infinitely. First method says that you should pick the sweeter ones and eat them, because you have no time for the rest, but you still want the rest. Second method says that you should throw the whole bowl away, therefore having no apples to eat at all. More or less, every unsatisfied need makes us unhappy.
ReplyDeleteYou cannot declassify anything as a need, you can either satisfy it or get rid of it. For example smoking, you either smoke or you quit, you cannot think of it as something you could do to pass time. You either need it or you don't.
Being happy and being content are not the same. I define true happiness as a total lack of unsatisfied needs. So being content is just somewhere along the way to happiness. Being content means that there is nothing big that worries you, but you could always find some need that is unsatisfied, even if it is a childish dream of being a superhero.
You say that happiness requires something extra - of course it does, the extra is just one more need, that you have no exact knowledge of yet.
Reaching true happiness in our society is impossible, but if you believe the monks practicing the second method, then they have claimed to have reached the true peace and freedom, which is exactly the same as true happiness.