Happiness & contentment: How we keep changing the goalpost instead of simply scoring the goal!
I have read many introspective and interesting articles on medium, and quite a few of them allude to how people complicate relationships even before they start, by having unhealthy expectations. I have since been pondering this, in relation to life in general and not limited to love or relationships. This got me wondering why we as humans feel compelled to complicate things as much as possible for ourselves even though we ultimately have to suffer the consequences of said complications.
I always thought of emotions as being in different classes. You have primary emotions over which we have little to no control like:- feeling pain from contact with a hot object, feeling apprehension when facing an uncertain situation. (Please note these are my own personal perspectives of emotions, and it isn’t in relation to any other person’s work so please don’t compare!).
Then we have secondary emotions which seem like primary emotions but actually are not, because we can usually control them and in fact our refusal to control them is what makes them feel primary. Examples could be:- being scared of an animal or situation. Feeling fear at the sight of something unsettling is a primary emotion but being scared is secondary, I.e. you can decide NOT to be scared! Physical attraction(desire) for someone is a primary emotion, we can choose to deny the attraction or ignore it, however we generally can’t control the initial attraction which is the primary emotion. Being in love however is definitely a secondary emotion we have lots of control over whether we are in love or not, love only feels uncontrollable when we choose not to control it from the onset (primary emotion).
Then we also have the biggies, the tertiary emotions which are usually combinations of primary and secondary emotions things like happiness, fulfilment, contentment, envy, dissatisfaction. These feelings are complex and powerful, making them hard to quantify thus making us feel powerless against them. People spend their lives searching for happiness or contentment, some trying to remove the dissatisfaction in their lives. But how can you control a complex system without first understanding it’s constituent parts? And if you can control the individual parts why is the whole such an elusive target?
Things are made more complex by our natural inclination to search outwards for internal solutions, I realize this sounds irrational but that is just it, humans ARE irrational. If a problem is too complex our instinctive mental protection system pushes the blame external, thus removing the mental burden of having to find a solution, in other words our brains often makes up answers we can live with! These answers are rarely true and accepting them often removes the need to solve the actual problem but at least we get to sleep well at night.
I am guessing at this point you are wondering why you have to understand your emotions whatever the class, and what of all of this has got to do with happiness. Well lets look at the primary feelings that might constitute happiness:- a consistent feeling of safety, a consistent feeling of joy, ability to prevent physical discomfort from hunger, cold, heat, ailments e.t.c, a feeling of belonging(acceptance should be mutual between people), ability to pursue pleasant stimulations (sex, sports, hobbies e.t.c). This list is definitely not exhaustive as I don’t think anyone can really exhaust such a list.
All of these seem quite basic and attainable, why then does true happiness seem like an elusive unrealistic goal? Let’s us compare with actions we typically take to become happy:-
- We usually get jobs and careers that take up so much time we have none left to attend to our primary emotions, in fact these jobs often require us to portray emotions contrary to what we are really feeling thus making us more unhappy.
- We use the money from such vocations to buy expensive things and go to expensive places thus segregating ourselves further from people that would accept us for our basic selves and we spend more time with people where it really feels like an extension of our career thus facing the same pressures as above.
- We use external standards to determine the answers to internal questions, i.e. MTV, and ETV determine what kind of person you should find attractive even though physical attraction is actually a biological response which is primary. Thus you ignore the person you biologically find attractive and go in pursuit of the person you think you should be attracted to, even though you probably aren’t.
- We complicate primary desires with externally influenced answers, the primary need to consume fluid to quench your thirst becomes complicated with external factors thus becoming a desire to drink a $1000 bottle of champagne. This solution brings with it complications like cost, venue & people, all of which aren’t necessarily optimized to increase your happiness.
I could go on and on, as before this is also an in-exhaustive list the point however is to establish a trend, showing how not analysing what really makes you happy and refusing to differentiate your needs from wants can lead to you losing strategic fit between your actions and your goals. A subconscious drift occurs between our intent/goals and the actual actions we take.
What are the things you really need as opposed to the things you want? What emotions can you really control and which ones can’t you control? How much of your actions/decisions are in alignment with what you really need, want or hope to achieve? In a manner of speaking do you really “want” what you want?? Maybe the deepest happiness comes from the simplest things.
The problem with too much external influence is the dynamic nature of the world, which means the external standards and factors keep changing, thus basic goals like happiness, love & contentment become mysterious and elusive. This creates a funny situation where there is failure, not because of an inability to succeed, but due to a subconscious unwillingness to succeed!
A basic understanding of our emotions and how they interact, helps us isolate what really matters to us. Prioritization and alignment of our internal requirements with our actions will easily make elusive goals attainable. In other words instead of consistently changing the goal post why don’t we just score the goal!
Yinka Ayinla
MBA, PMP, Beng
yinka.ayinla@consultbase.net
