How building a worldview brings you happiness
From ancient philosophy through to the latest psychotherapies, understanding our values remains key to finding happiness.
The ancient philosophy
A Cypriot by the name of Zeno living in Athens at the turn of the 3rd century BC is credited with creating the Stoic school of philosophy.
Stoicism quickly attracted a following, becoming hugely popular across the Ancient Greek and then Ancient Roman worlds.
More than just keeping a stiff upper lip, the Stoic school emphasises the root of happiness and a life well lived is simply where our actions are consistent with our values.
Defining what is “good” and the ultimate source of happiness has always been a tricky pastime.
Other schools of thought have adopted a black and white approach, asserting actions by their nature are incontrovertibly good or bad. The problem is much of the world is many shades of grey.
Still other schools have instead asserted we can pursue happiness by maximising pleasure and minimising pain. The problem here is that some actions, while maximising pleasure for some may cause pain for others. More grey.
The Stoic solution is to take a step back, to determine not whether the action itself is good or bad objectively or by its outcome, but by the values and virtues that informed our actions in the first place.
It means we can be happy when we do something that’s fair but makes us poorer. It means donating to charity can be either good or bad depending on our motivations.
It means we can be happy even in the face of adversity, so long as we maintain our virtues such as temperance, patience or courage. It means we can bear pain for the right cause.
This is where the stiff upper lip understanding of being “stoic” originates.
More than abstract theory, the Stoics present their philosophy as a way of life to be applied in our everyday actions and encounters.
More recently this same values based approach to the pursuit of happiness has found a home in psychotherapy.
The latest psychotherapy
Cognitive behaviour therapy, known simply as CBT, emerged late last century as a popular practice in psychotherapy.
CBT is now the most widely used therapy for treating a range of mental illnesses and, like Stoicism, relies on the notion that our interpretations of events have a greater impact on us than the events themselves.
CGT involves leading a patient through a discovery process of their own thoughts, feelings and beliefs. CBT then encourages the patient to develop skills to challenge and question unhelpful patterns in these thoughts, feelings and beliefs.
To bring about happiness then, practitioners of both CBT and Stoicism advocate taking action when outcomes are within our control, and mindfully accepting the things that are not.
And the one thing we truly do have control over are our own thoughts and beliefs, our values.
So why build a worldview?
A worldview is the lens through which we see, assess and interpret the world around us. New information, events and ideas all pass through this prism. We use it to determine the good and the bad.
Our worldview is our views, values and beliefs collected over a lifetime. They fit together. Some more loosely, others dependent upon one another. At the centre our core beliefs often remain immovable while those at the periphery evolve in response to changes in the world around us.
Building, testing and revising our own worldview is a social, intuitive, lifelong project, but it won’t bring happiness by itself.
Building a worldview and better understanding our values does however give us better guide for our own actions and a clearer lens through which to interpret the world around us.
In these ways building a worldview gives us both a greater sense of control over our lives, and also a much stronger sense identity and of our place in the world.
Prescribed by ancient philosophers and your friendly local psychologist alike, these are the ways building a worldview can bring you happiness.
Richard Shannon is the founder of Worldview Exchange, startup enabling people to easily and intuitively fulfil their natural desire to explore, grow, revise, test, compare and share their views, values and beliefs; their worldview.
