The 4 Fundamental Truths to Happiness
Happiness begins with “knowing.” What you need to know before practising gratitude, journaling or any other happiness-amplifying tip.
The vast literature out there on the science of happiness and well-being provides resounding reassurance that humans have an incredible capacity for happiness.
Of late, cues like journaling, gratitude, and practising forgiveness have become ready-made prescriptions for increasing good feelings. While each of these pro-tips is efficacious, they come in handy down the line. In other words, profound happiness does not start with either of these habits.
Whether your perception of happiness is hedonistic ( i.e., attaching happiness to the pursuit of pleasures and absence of pain) or utilitarian (seeking happiness in deeds that make others happy), understanding some basic truths that underlie happiness is the first step in the thousand-league-journey to a happy, fulfilled and contented life. Here are four of these fundamental truths that cut across the conceptual domains of happiness.
1. The purpose of life is not to be happy
The purpose of life is not to be happy — Ralph Waldo Emerson
This truth may challenge one of your self-serving assumptions about life, but we are not here to be happy—and you know it.
Everyone must deal with this self-evident truth to make headway on their quest for a pleasant life.
No doubt, everybody wants to be happy. Happiness is an ageless topic that spans millennia of human history. Today, you are likely to get 90 out of 100 people —if not 99 —to answer “I just want to be happy” if you ask them, “What is the one thing you want in life?” The remaining 10 people — or 1, who predictably give other responses like “money, a lot of it,” “a peaceful home,” “a loving relationship,” or “family,” also attach these desires to happiness.
Perhaps due to a widely held misconception or some universal human instinct, we have (sub)consciously exchanged the “ultimate pursuit in life” for the “ultimate purpose of life.” Meanwhile, happiness not being the purpose of life does not preclude living a happy life.
But are we here to be happy? I doubt the answer is yes. We are not here to be happy, at least not all the time. The purpose of life is not to be happy. Neither is it to be sad.
On the purpose of life, Ralph Waldo Emerson muses:
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
As humans, we have the capacity for different feelings as consequences of our actions, inactions, choices, decisions, and reactions to our environment and events (opportunities and hardships). In addition to providing an avenue for experiencing different emotions, life, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, is a one-shot opportunity to be the best version of ourselves. From the theistic viewpoint, life is a test of our goodness, a transitory stage to another form of existence.
Instead of spending every precious minute of life wishing we were happier, we would do better living life doing things that truly matter whether or not we are certain those things will grease our pleasure spot. Interestingly, doing the right things, even though we do not feel like it, rewards us with more positive feelings in the long run than gratifying every whim.
2. Happiness is not a “grand prize”
By far the biggest mistake people make as they quest for happiness is: pursuing happiness as if it was a “grand prize.”
Thus, people hunt for happiness as if it was a concrete target, a final destination, or a fixed state of being. This misrepresented nature of happiness presents it as a mountaintop that a person has to spend every day of their life climbing or arrive at, eventually, after episodes of toil.
Instead of seeing happiness as a grand prize, a specific goal or a defined target, it helps to see it as a product. Although people erroneously seek out happiness for happiness sake, in reality, we reap happiness from our actions, reactions, and decisions.
3. Happiness Lies in the Old Ways
I am not a fan of Darwinʼs theory of Evolution, especially for its exaggerated veneration despite irreconcilable conflicts. But I do enjoy some notions in evolutionary psychology. One of such claims is that: Man is not a modern invention.
From the plethora of studies on what makes people happy, we always find little old things dominating the list e.g., desiring less, putting the concern of others first, spending quality time with family and friends, being charitable or extending help to someone in need.
Happiness lies in the old ways not in the uptight ways of modern life. Unfortunately, we want to live in the present times with its modern traits: an endless list of wishes, longer hours of work for bigger bucks over less quality time with family and friends, frail connectedness over the internet, and strictly formal, mind-your-businesses style of living that plays down the value of caring about the stranger on the street.
In Alone Together, MIT professor, Sherry Turkle, describes how technology has fractioned our intimacies and replaced genuine interaction with illusory digital companionship. Nothing could be truer. Until we learn to live more of the ‘primitive’ ways, we may never get our fill from the happiness goblet.
4. Happiness is not a static way of feeling
Nothing lasts forever, so it is wrong to desire happiness all the time! No man feels happy or sad all the time. Not even Jesus. There is always a buffer state, a state of negative feeling, a state of indifference.
Transience is a core characteristic of life, and thus everything in and around it. We, our feelings, needs, and wants obey this law of transiency. Hence, hedonism is not always a realistic approach to good living.
Arnold Glasow sums this universal truth accurately when he remarked that “Nothing lasts forever — not even our troubles.”
Indeed, nothing lasts forever; not our feelings, yearnings, or passions. Not even our wins or miseries. Everything, including our good and bad feelings, is as fleeting as us.
The morbid drive to always experience a grandiose state of happiness is what pushes people to gratify deleterious desires that confer fleeting sensations of pleasure like clubbing ad infinitum, binge-eating, or binge-watching. While pleasure offers momentary gratification, fun is not equal to happiness — at least not on the broader happiness index. Even if it does, it is impossible that all moments of one’s life are pleasurable.
As a result of this non-constant reality of life, you have to re-experience happiness at different times. And many of the time, you have to be a victim of the paradoxes of life. Paradoxes of life are many. Without one extreme, the other is inconceivable: without death, there’s no value for life; food will not be of interest if there was no hunger stimulus, and happiness may seem tasteless without the feeling of numbness or sadness.
Takeaway:
True felicity is not far-flung when we grasp the rudiments of happiness. By understanding that our ultimate goal in life is not to be happy and that happiness is neither a fixed state nor a final destination, it becomes easier to keep a serene heart through life’s thick and thin. And, by picking some habits from the old, un-twenty-first-century ways, we will increase our good feelings in counterintuitive ways.
