Compassion Despite Social Media
Living Happy
Earlier today, I walked into our home office and Shaun looked up at me from his desk and said, “What is wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You fibber.” He planted his feet on the carpet and waited.
”I looked at Twitter, I mean X and it—It made me really sad,” I admitted.
“Why would you do that?”
“Sometimes . . .” I tried to figure it out while I talked, “sometimes I am trying to figure out what people are thinking—people who aren’t me.”
In my three minutes on there, I saw a lot of naked things, conspiracy things, animated dogs getting hit by trucks, and AI-images that made no sense. I saw fear and hate and greed, over and over again.
“I guess it got to me,” I said.
“It’s hard to be happy when you’re surrounded by hate,” he said.
And that is true. It’s hard when there is pain and disaster and oppression and war. So, how do you work on compassion and happiness when other people seem to be actively working against it?
Matthieu Ricard is often called the “world’s happiest man,” and in an interview with the New York Times, he said, when asked about the secrets of happiness, “You know, once I was on the India Today Conclave. They said, ‘Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?’ I said: ‘First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.’ I’m happy to feel I am on the right track. I cannot imagine feeling hate or wanting someone to suffer.”
This is, obviously, the opposite of every podcast, blogger, TikTok, YouTube and Medium headline, right?
It’s not just three hot secrets to happiness.
It’s not eight quick steps to being cheerful.
It’s a lifetime of work—deliberate work and choices.
I do not meditate every day. I do not ground myself in sounds or the forest, but I want to be happier and I want to be kinder and I want to be more compassionate. And I fail a lot of the time because I get so frustrated that other people don’t want that for themselves, too.
I know! I know! Ridiculous, right?
Ricard links compassion and happiness often in his writings and in his talks, including in that Times interview where he says, “When we speak of compassion, you want everybody to find happiness. No exception. You cannot just do that for those who are good to you or close to you. It has to be universal.”
And later on, when asked why compassion needs to be universal, he says, “Because this is different from moral judgment. It doesn’t prevent you from saying that those are walking psychopaths, that they have no heart. But compassion is to remedy suffering wherever it is, whatever form it takes and whoever causes it. So what is the object of compassion here? It is the hatred and the person under its power. If someone beats you with a stick, you don’t get angry with the stick — you get angry with the person. These people we are talking about are like sticks in the hands of ignorance and hatred. We can judge the acts of a person at a particular time, but compassion is wishing that the present aspect of suffering and the causes of suffering may be remedied.”
So, I think that I’m going to work on my compassion as I work on my happiness. I mean, it’s working for Richard, right?
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Positive Psychology article about the philosophy of happiness
*Just so you know, I can’t find anyone that the press has claimed is the happiest woman in the world. I’ll keep looking!