Happiness is when you stop desiring for things. Desire is necessary for human growth. Does that mean we can never be Happy?
How Does Human Behavior Work?
The purpose is to clarify bit by bit about human behavior.
Awareness comes before desire. A craving is created when you
assign meaning to a cue. Your brain constructs an emotion or feeling to
describe your current situation, and that means a craving can only
occur after you have noticed an opportunity.
Happiness is simply the absence of desire. When you observe
a cue but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the
current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure
(which is joy or satisfaction) but about the lack of desire.
It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.
However, happiness is fleeting because a new desire always comes
along. As Caed Budris says, “Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.”
Likewise, suffering is the space between craving a change in state and getting it.
It is the idea of pleasure that we chase. We seek the image of
pleasure that we generate in our minds. At the time of action, we do
not know what it will be like to attain that image (or even if it will
satisfy us).
The feeling of satisfaction only comes afterward. This is
what the Austrian neurologist Victor Frankl meant when he said that
happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue. Desire is pursued.
Pleasure ensues from the action.
Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into
problems. The first step in any behavior is observation. You notice a
cue, a bit of information, an event. If you do not desire to act on what
you observe, then you are at peace.
Craving is about wanting to fix everything. Observation without
craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything. Your
desires are not running rampant. You do not crave a change in state.
Your mind does not generate a problem for you to solve. You’re simply
observing and existing.
With a big enough why you can overcome any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and poet, famously
wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
This phrase harbors an important truth about human behavior. If your
motivation and desire are great enough (that is, why are you are
acting), you’ll take action even when it is quite difficult. Great craving
can power great action—even when friction is high.
Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated
and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to
action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it
doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts
behavior.
As Naval Ravikant says, “The trick to doing anything is first
cultivating a desire for it.”
