What even is happiness?
Can you be happy if you aren't sure what it is?
Confucius in his analects talks about jen or ren. And to him happiness was all about dignity.
Dacher Keltner, director of psychology at UC Berkeley, says,
“It's about conveying your sense of reverence or humanity towards others. Let me give you an illustrative quote that really gets to the heart of the philosophy of Confucius and jen: A person of jen or humanity who finds happiness and brings it to others, brings good of others to completion and does not bring the bad in others to completion.”
Now the thing that is a bit striking about that concept for our society right now is that it’s not about self; it’s about others. And when you have a super individualistic culture and talk show people and influencers talking about you all the time, that creates a bit of a brain glitch for some of us.
Isn’t happiness about me?
His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, writes: "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."
So at least one of the ways to contentment or happiness is about looking out.
As Keltner says in his course, “The Science of Happiness,”
“The pathway to the state of happiness or nirvana really starts from the recognition, the first noble truth, that there are a lot of difficulties in life, there is a lot of suffering. The second noble truth is that we suffer because of illusions, because of grasping for things that might not bring us happiness because of certain types of ignorance, that we find nirvana and happiness and peacefulness when we detach from these clinging tendencies and grasping.”
I’ve been talking a lot this past year about there are sort of scripts in our brains, well-worn routes of thinking that might not be what we really want or who we really are.
We think: To be successful is to have seven houses or clear skin.
But we don’t think about why that would mean success to us or where that notion comes from, right? Or we don’t often do it. Or we’ll go into catastrophic thinking if we make a mistake like misspelling someone’s last name with one l instead of two in a news article. (Cough. Me.) And then we’ll hear that voice in our head that says we’re worthless. That we have no purpose.
Cough. Again. Me.
I have big problems with this. But it’s true for me that when I turn outward and focus on being kind, I am a much better, happier human. My other problem is that I sometimes can’t turn that outward focus and empathy off.
In Taoism, it is written that happiness is a bit of a paradox.
As Keltner writes, “The meaning of life may not be necessarily grasped by your rational mind, you have to experience it, let it unfold.”
Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching, "When man is born he is tender and weak. At death he is stiff and hard. All things, as well as the grass and the trees, tender and subtle while alive, when dead, withered and dried. Therefore, the tender and the weak are the companions of life and the stiff and the hard are companions of death."
“It's a little bit paradoxical: weakness and tenderness may be the pathway to life and the Tao and the mysterious force of life. And again, challenging us to put aside preconceptions to find happiness,” Keltner writes.
In his EdX class, he brings students to Greece and Aristotle who in the Nicomachean Ethics spoke about happiness as an end of life thing where you look back and say, “Whoo, yeah, I was virtuous.”
He talks about the Principle of Moderation,
“So Aristotle writes when articulating his Principle of Moderation, anyone can become angry. That's easy. But to be angry at the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose and the right way that’s not within everybody's power and that's not easy and that is really the appropriate fashion that when our passions are cultivated in the right context, they bring us happiness and the good life. And even passions like anger when, for example, engaged in societal injustice can bring about a lot of good and happiness. Aristotle is suggesting moderation and acceptance of our passions as a pathway to happiness.”
And then there is hedonism where it’s all about the pleasure, about a lack of pain.
“If I wanted to know if I'm happy or not from this hedonistic perspective, which is sometimes called the Epicurean philosophy, I would sort of take stock of my delicious meals, if I had a wonderful cup of coffee or burrito, have I enjoyed the beauty of walking in the woods with the sensation of sun on the skin? And that would tell me that I'm happy today. It is really based in the sensations of the senses I've experienced.”
Then John Stuart Mill and his buddies started the enlightenment philosophy and happiness is about the greater good and how your actions impact that greater good for the most people possible.
Keltner writes,
“Happiness is found in actions that lift up the welfare in as many people as possible. What that starts to do, as we saw with many of the Eastern thinkers as well, is that happiness may not be about your own personal pleasure or the delights you experience, but rather it's about bringing a lot of good to other people. It's about lifting up communities as a way to define happiness. This philosophy was a really important underpinning that Thomas Jefferson wrote that we really have to guarantee the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If you allow societies to pursue this utilitarian notion of happiness of lifting up the welfare of others, societies will do pretty well.”
Hinduism talks about happiness as being free of desire. Yoga emphasizes how you breathe and posture as ways to happiness. Mark Addleman thinks value equals happiness, but again, he might since his job is all about product placement.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Richard McNally writes of The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, by the psychiatrist Robert Waldinger and the clinical psychologist Marc Schulz. In the book, the duo say that happiness is from health (mental and physical) and social fitness, connecting positively with other people is “as least as important as proper nutrition, physical exercise, adequate sleep and the avoidance of harmful habits such as smoking. Yet it is easy to take these relationships for granted in today’s individualistic and hyper-competitive societies.”
McNally reflects that earlier thought of Eastern philosophers during his review, writing, “Happiness is not a destination, a goal to be achieved. It is not a state of being but a process of becoming. And the good life is not devoid of disappointments, failures and struggles.”
Happiness is about becoming.
Happiness is about kindness.
Happiness is about breathing.
Happiness is about not having wants.
Happiness is about lifting up community.
Happiness has a lot going on right there, doesn’t it? What do you think?
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-good-life-review-the-habit-of-happiness-11673478213
https://kyoko-uchida.medium.com/value-happiness-d30ba569fe86
The Science of Happiness, Berkeley, EdX