Getting what you want will not make you happy

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RikersBeard
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22 Dec 2011, 6:15 am

Where does happiness come from?

That’s really been the most important question people have asked as long as we have been wondering about the nature of our world and ourselves. All we do, we do in order to be happy and yet many of us never reach that goal.

We chase happiness in different ways, the most obvious being to try to get the things that we want. Many believe that if you want something, that must be because getting it will make you happy, and then they go chasing after the things they want. This is what nature’s hamster wheel is designed to make you do and what your brain is designed to keep you doing throughout your entire life through its crafty self-deception. That’s the very reason this course of action will never make you happy, or even content for very long.

Some people get analytical about the issue and start wondering what it is they’re missing that they need in order to be happy. They might look at others and think “oh, Johnny has XYZ and he’s happy and I’m not, so I must also get XYZ in order to be happy”. Then they work hard to get whatever Johnny has and when even that doesn’t make them happy, they think “oh, I was wrong, it’s really Johnny’s DFG that makes him happy, that’s what I need to get”, and the cycle can repeat itself forever. One day they may even get drunk and confess their envy to Johnny himself, and Johnny might tell them that he’s not really happy either but he’s trying real hard to look like he is.

There’s a saying:

“There are two ways to be unhappy. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting what you want”.

When you don’t get what you want, at least you have something to blame for your unhappiness. If you get what you want and realize that you still aren’t happy, that’s when you can really start feeling like you’re going crazy. People who suddenly get everything they want, who win the lottery or realize their lifelong dream of becoming a pop star or something, they can have real problems because of it. You hear about celebrities behaving strangely all the time, overdosing on cocaine or suddenly shaving their head in a fit of rage or hanging themselves in a hotel room. Is this the behavior of a happy person? It’s when things get really good that they can get really bad if you keep expecting some achievement or acquisition to make you happy.

Others blame their circumstances: “if only this situation wasn’t like this, I’d be happy.” If these people happen to be lying in the road under an eighteen-wheeler, they may have a point, but most of the time that’s not the case and they’re just deluding themselves. They’re not going to be much happier if their circumstances change, they’ll just find something else to blame. These people just want to blame something outside themselves so at least they won’t have to feel like they’re unhappy and causing it themselves. The irony of that situation is that assuming responsibility for the problems in your life is exactly what can help you fix your problems, but as long as these people refuse to do that they will have little chance of improving their situation. Circumstances that people blame for their unhappiness can range from where they live to what their job is to pretty much anything, even other people. Blaming another person or a specific group of people for your unhappiness is unfortunately quite common and, needless to say, a source of great animosity, conflict and needless suffering.

Where, then, do you get happiness? People have traveled to the ends of the earth in search of an answer. Still the answer has eluded even many of the greatest thinkers in human history, and I’m inclined to believe this explanation as to why: happiness cannot be achieved by thinking. It cannot be bought or eaten or f****d or conquered. It cannot be “gotten” from anywhere, because nothing outside you can make you happy. Happiness can only come from inside you, and you already have it because you were born with it.

Happiness is a default state.

Children have it when they come into the world. They don’t need a “reason” to be happy, they just are that way. Unless there is an immediate emergency in the form of hunger, injury or the like, a child will naturally tend toward a happy and content state of being. Happiness is simply the absence of suffering.

This is not news. It’s an ancient wisdom, old as dirt, that’s been repeated in countless forms at least since the time of the Buddha if not earlier. And on some level, beneath the veil of our natural self-deception, we all know it. It’s embedded in our language: the word “unhappy” implies a lack of happiness, that the happiness which you already had was taken away. We don’t say that a poor person is “un-rich”. We assume it in children, if a child is not happy we ask what’s wrong with it. We don’t ask that about adults. The Bushmen do. Our society and our culture has deluded us into thinking that unhappiness in the default state and we must achieve happiness somehow. This is not true. We were born with happiness and just learned to suppress it. All that’s required for it to resurface is for us to stop doing that. We already have all the “stuff” we could ever need. There are people in starving third-world ghettos who are happier than the average millionaire. Nothing external stands in the way of our happiness, just ourselves.

This might even have been somewhat obvious to you as the logical next step from realizing that you can choose whether to let something “make” you upset or angry. Or, it might not. Either way, the same warning applies here too: just as you’re unlikely to become as calmly accepting as the Japanese Zen master overnight, restoring your natural default happiness will probably not happen with a snap of your fingers either. Realizing the truth about the nature of happiness and where it comes from is a good start though, and the future can only bring improvement.

How, then, have we managed to escape the happiness that should already be within us? How did we manage to lose what we had at birth?

Think about why small children are happy. What would you say if asked to explain it? You might point out that children don’t seem to worry about anything, past or future, they don’t want anything that they don’t already have, and they don’t expect anything from the future. These ideas are repeated in an old Buddhist wisdom, which holds that all suffering comes from desire: the desire to have something you don’t have, the desire to affect the future or alter the past, and the desire to have other people behave in some specific way all fall into the category of desires which cause suffering. We all know that people who worry a lot about some future problem are less happy than those who don’t worry about it as much, even if they both have the same problem. It’s not the existence of a future problem that causes you to suffer, it’s the act of worrying itself. To worry is to suffer.

The words “want” and “need” both basically mean “lack”, that something is missing which should rightfully belong somewhere. If you say you want or need food you are communicating that food belongs in your stomach and your stomach is not complete without it, that it suffers from the lack of food. This makes sense since you need food to survive. If you say you want a new, more fashionable set of clothes, you are similarly communicating that you are suffering from the lack of clothes, and that you are incomplete without a new set. That’s just deluded on the face of it.

Yet this is exactly what we convince ourselves of as kids, and that’s how we lose our inborn happiness. We start forming a peer group and social relations, and communicating with other people. Through this communication we learn that we’re not allowed to feel good or enjoy the acceptance of our peers unless we own the right brand of clothing of talk the right way or watch the right TV shows. And we believe it. With everyone else around us telling us this, it becomes harder for us to remember our parents’ advice about not letting other people’s disapproval have power over how we feel. So we buy into the prevailing system, we get the clothes and we learn the slang and we absorb the mass media entertainment that inculcates its own messages in us.

But it’s all a lie. Our happiness does not depend on any of those things. Even the approval of our peers doesn’t depend on them, although we are repeatedly and forcefully sent the message that it does. What our peers’ approval really depends on is something completely different, something that each generation of kids probably makes up their own word for because they associate the older generation’s word for the same thing with old age and the exact opposite of the quality which they invent the new word to describe. I don’t know what word is currently being used on the playgrounds, but I believe that of the many words for this quality, the one you and I would most associate with the quality in question is “cool”.

Your peers’ approval depends on how cool you are, and contrary to what those who wear a particular kind of clothing would have you believe in order to bolster their own standing in your eyes, coolness is not achieved by wearing fashionable clothes. It’s the other way around. Clothes become fashionable when cool people wear them. In order to be cool, you don’t need to buy anything or conform to anyone’s standards. If you’re cool, you’re cool no matter what you wear, and if you’re not, wearing something specific won’t make you cool. In fact, trying to be cool is the surest way to not be cool.

But children believe what they are told, and try as hard as they can to be cool. We start worrying about being cool, we start filling our minds with the desire for it, and we lose our default state of happiness. A big problem with wanting something is the fear of losing it, or never getting it. The worry and the wanting and the fear are the very things which make us lose our happiness, but when it happens we’re too young to realize what we should do about it, and we go along with everyone else and start a massive chain of delusion damage that will hurt us for years to come, maybe to the end of our life if we never learn how to fix it.

To combat our new-found unhappiness, we start making up logical reasons to feel good. “Look, I have these clothes and I play this sport and there’s a rumor around school that this girl likes me, that means I’m cool and allowed to feel happy.” We start building what’s called “the ego”. The word “ego” is used to mean many things, but here I’m talking specifically about the collection of ideas we have about ourselves that make up our positive “public” self-image that we try to display to others. We build the ego like a shell around us to protect our fragile selves, so whenever we feel threatened we can use those pieces of self-image to defend ourselves: “You think you can pick on me because you’re better than me at that thing? Well, I’m good at this one and I do this other thing better than you and I wear these cool clothes, so f**k you, f**k you to hell, Motherf***er, and don’t you ever try to make me feel bad again!” By the time we reach our teen years many of us are already well on our way to becoming angry, unhappy adults with chronically low self-esteem.

We can live out our whole lives being led around by our desires for new stuff, new toys, new clothes, cars, girlfriends, houses, extreme sports feats and career accomplishments to brag about. How often does new stuff really make anything better? Not very
often. Why might you still get it? Because you want it – you have the desire to own it and the desire needs to be eliminated by buying the stuff. The desire is in fact a form of suffering, it makes you feel disturbed that you don’t have something, and it makes you believe you can’t let yourself be happy until you have that something.

And that’s just what’s happening. You are deciding to make up a belief that says you won’t let yourself be happy unless conditions X, Y and Z prevail. Why would you want to do that?

That’s why the old wisdom says that to desire is to suffer. Desire is a contract you make with yourself not to let yourself feel happy unless a specific set of conditions prevail. If you recognize yourself here, maybe it’s time for a new contract: maybe it’s time to decide that you will let yourself be happy no matter what happens in the external world. Be mindful of this in your daily life and bit by bit the suppressed natural happiness will emerge from within you. If I can make it happen, anyone can. I used to think this type of stuff was the biggest crock of s**t, just a hollow consolation that people who were too weak to achieve and compete made up to keep from getting suicidally depressed, and still I managed to make this work for me when I eventually realized it in my own life. If I could do it, you definitely can. It doesn’t have to happen overnight but it’s going to happen bit by bit if you let it.

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The_Perfect_Storm
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22 Dec 2011, 10:50 am

Children aren't happy by default. I wasn't.

This article is basically BS propaganda. Give up all your stuff, put your goals aside. Then you'll be happy.

It doesn't work that way. It doesn't generalise to most of the human population. I will say though that happiness is not dependent on any one thing. The requirements for happiness will vary from person to person and will change for each person over time.



Fnord
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22 Dec 2011, 10:52 am

Money makes me happy. Without money, I would be living on the street, and that's a very unhappy place to live.

Whoever said, "Money can't buy happiness" seems to have forgotten or ignored the fact that poverty can't buy anything.



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22 Dec 2011, 10:57 am

Fnord wrote:
Money makes me happy. Without money, I would be living on the street, and that's a very unhappy place to live.

Whoever said, "Money can't buy happiness" seems to have forgotten or ignored the fact that poverty can't buy anything.


What if you were some dirty old man living off the land in some fantastic rainforest or something? Who needs money when you can forage for berries and all that good stuff?



Dunnyveg
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22 Dec 2011, 11:14 am

I have to agree with Fnord, though Storm is right that happiness, or how to achieve it, has been as much a perennial philosophy as religion. In the West, the Platonics thought happiness was an ethereal, interior quality that could not be affected by external circumstances. The Aristotelians, including me, think that while externalities may not bring happiness, a lack of them can bring unhappiness; I agree with Fnord.

I saw a study not too long ago that confirms my position. The happiest Americans are those who make around seventy-five grand a year. It's not that possessions will make us happy, but want can make us unhappy.



RikersBeard
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22 Dec 2011, 11:38 am

Quote:
Money makes me happy. Without money, I would be living on the street, and that's a very unhappy place to live.


Suffering is all relative. You'd only be unhappy living on the street if your peers are living in houses.


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Fnord
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22 Dec 2011, 1:07 pm

The_Perfect_Storm wrote:
Fnord wrote:
Money makes me happy. Without money, I would be living on the street, and that's a very unhappy place to live. Whoever said, "Money can't buy happiness" seems to have forgotten or ignored the fact that poverty can't buy anything.
What if you were some dirty old man living off the land in some fantastic rainforest or something? Who needs money when you can forage for berries and all that good stuff?

... and catch a tropical disease, or get bitten or stung by some venomous creature, or attacked by a jungle creature or xenophobic native with no health care or hope of rescue?

No thanks, I prefer civilization and the happiness that money can buy.



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22 Dec 2011, 1:10 pm

RikersBeard wrote:
Quote:
Money makes me happy. Without money, I would be living on the street, and that's a very unhappy place to live.
Suffering is all relative. You'd only be unhappy living on the street if your peers are living in houses.

No ... I've lived on the street, where my peers at the time also lived, and where happiness came only temporarily from a stolen bottle of booze.



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22 Dec 2011, 2:35 pm

Fnord wrote:
No ... I've lived on the street, where my peers at the time also lived, and where happiness came only temporarily from a stolen bottle of booze.


Happiness != contentment. That said, I'll settle for contentment. Happiness will or won't arrive, and it will or won't stick around. Contentment I can control.