So I've been thinking about happiness recently. What makes us happy, why it does, who are we if we aren't people chasing happiness...it was interesting. I don't think I'll be original in any way, even if I came to certain conclusions on my own but I feel I can express my thoughts. So unfortunately, I think there are many ways to become happy (just as many to become sad).
One of the biggest ways I think someone can be happy is to have really low standards for themselves...in everything. This may lead to them not reaching their "full potential" but that's not the goal I was looking to achieve in this thought experiment. Most of my misery and happiness both stem from how I perceive I am doing in accordance to my goals. If I'm right on course, I'll be content. If I'm behind, I'll be sad. If I'm ahead, I'll be happy. So the lower my standards, the higher chance I'll be happy I suppose. The only problem is that as we become happier, I'd imagine the standards we hold ourselves to will naturally become harder to achieve since we can obviously handle the current goal set with ease.
So in this sense, happiness can't happen in the long run. It is only a short term thing, a moment's glory before you go back to rowing in the galley that is life. I don't think sadness is a long term thing either for the same reason. Unless there is a chemical imbalance in the person I suppose, then either can probably be long term. But overall, I think the only thing we can be in the long run is content.
This can be applied to religious happiness too. O, well I shouldn't say it that way. Most religious people are almost offended by the term "happiness" in reference to religion. I'll use words like "grace", "fulfillment", and "filled with the Hold Spirit" but really I think it's all happiness just through different venues. It too goes away. Whenever I see myself growing closer to God and am hap... feeling "full of grace" I notice that my expectations for myself religiously also get higher to where I eventually fail or barely meet them and thus become religiously content.
Another thing that helps support that it is a purely internal thing based on our expectations of ourselves is the way we feel about the external world. I remember reading the results of a survey where most people preferred to have $100,ooo a year while their friends got $75,000 as opposed to the person and their friends both getting $150,000 (neglecting inflation and blah, blah, blah). When I read this I thought "Man, we all are a bunch of jerks, look at this. An honest survey of people saying they want more power and wealth than their friends, even if it costs them money in absolute terms.
I think this report is key. The absolutes of our lives don't matter. What matters is our perception of how we are doing. And if you are getting more money than the people you know, you're doing better than most people, and that's a reason to be happy right? Pathetic. This breaks down in a large picture though. Example, America versus ALL of Africa. We rape them in terms of money, power, technology, and even bare necessities. The average person in America is doing so much better than the average person in Africa. But this doesn't make us happier. All it does is cause us to dissociate with "those people" ugh, watch out, that orphan probably has AIDS. That's us. The U.S. It doesn't make us happier, why? Because in our own country we see those who are richer and more famous than us so we push ourselves and grimace at the sad predicament we are in only getting a new car every five years while some punk African kid we don't care about dies of thirst. Well he probably deserved it, don't worry about it. Their closer to animals than people, right? How else could they live in such conditions? So we stop worrying about them.
An interesting side note is that those who are wealthy in our nation aren't any happier, after all, their expectations of life have raised so it is much easier to be depressed than happy. That's us, that is life. I think we all need to abandon happiness.
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