Happy life: A myth or reality?

 

Happiness: A rare virtue

Everybody wants to stay happy; it’s something you can’t just take out of people. Every single person on this planet is indulged in the eternal (at least for as long as our physical manifestation allows us to walk this earth) pursuit of happiness. Do they ever get it? Do they manage to achieve what they have been yearning for? My opinion: all these questions can only be answered by the very person indulging himself in this endless chase. Does he find himself happy? What’s even more compelling to ask is: how can he tell whether he is happy or not?

I think I have established this before quite well that emotions are a subjective phenomenon; what one might feel happiness from may be the reason of anger or sadness for the other. People connect to each other by emotions; they look for people who possess more or less the same emotional spectrum as them. For example; usually best friends are people who have the same likings, exhibit the same emotional behaviours when exposed to different stimuli, and who have a similar worldview. It’s like finding the right matching pair out of a sample of multiple clothes. All of us are good at matching clothes to make up a new style which suits our underlying personalities. The same way, we choose friends who help us express our innate personalities to the full extent. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack; there are tons of people, all with their own idiosyncrasies in one way or another. By that logic, we can deduce that it must be a very hard task to find that one person who has a similar emotional spectrum as you. But au contraire, we end up finding tons of such people, even hundreds. Now why is that? If logic dictates that taking uniqueness as a factor, it must be a nigh-impossible task to find someone similar to us, but when we look at real life, we find tons of people with similar characteristics form a group.

Can we provide evolutionary development as a reasonable explanation for this observation? Humans have been driven to form social groups by evolutionary forces since the inception of the homo sapiens species (even way before that; take homo neanderthalis as an example.). Humans have always tended to form groups and stick together in those said groups. Basically, it isn’t in our nature to survive alone. A very big example of this can be seen in the modern-world; people who are loners tend to exhibit somewhat “alien” behaviours; they don’t communicate that effectively, they fail to blend in with people, and they are angry and depressed a very huge chunk of the time. Here we can put in another argument for humans being happy; we desire human contact for happiness as well. Humans can’t stay happy on their own all the time; we stay happy for longer durations when surrounded by people we feel are closer to us than others.

But… what determines whether somebody is close to us or not? After all, the very first people we see when we enter this world are our mom and dad right? Then our progenitors, aka our parents, should be the closest to us… and that is the case, at least until we live with them. But humans are a very complex kind of animal. We can’t follow a pre-determined trajectory, the way we can predict the lives of other animals. A higher power has provided us with “self-consciousness”, the ability to perceive the “self” aspect of our being. It is this aspect of our being which results in such numerous possibilities in how one perceives things, how one perceives emotions, their thought process, and other things related to the psyche.

What is interesting is: our “self” is not some eternal, infallible, unchangeable entity. It can be conditioned; conditioned to how people want to see you as. But it is a matter of will; some people don’t condition themselves according to how others see them, but instead according to how they want to see themselves. The conditioning is still there, but the spectator whom we want to satisfy are two different people in these two scenarios. In both cases, change does occur, but the first kind of people go on to become ‘people-pleasers’ while the second kind have what is known as ‘self-love’. I myself am a bit on the former side. There is not a clear line between the two, after all, we are discussing an entirely subjective topic here; nothing is clear. We are making deductions based on “relative” observations. To sum it up, we can decide who we want to be and change our personality, but it might be based on what others want to see us as, or what we might want to become in the future.

But I am digressing. We were talking about the emotion of happiness. As I had meant to say in the first place, happiness may also be driven by evolutionary factors, since we are happier when people similar to us are around us. It helps us discover more of who we are. In some respects, its like looking in a mirror; you see a differently faced, but equally similar mirror image of yourself. There is no physical identicality, but a psychological one.

Happiness is a fickle thing; it does not stick around for long. Now according to the Bhagavad Gita, true happiness is attained from within, when you stop relying on external factors to make yourself happy, and instead introspect and discover your ataman, the “Self”, which according to the revered scripture, is immortal and the same in every living being. There is no unique identity in anyone of us; it’s just a shell, binding us to the world around us. This is perhaps the reason why this “pseudo-self” can be moulded to our liking, or to the liking of others. The Gita also states that true happiness can only be achieved if we discover our true nature, and accept our reality as a part of the greater power, a fragment of God. Personally, I am not too involved in this level of thought. I am more of a living-simple-until-exciting-things-happen kind of guy. I don’t think to this level too often, because when I do, it sometimes messes with my head a bit too much. All I am aware of is, we humans have a compulsive need to stay happy, by whatever means necessary.

But I still ponder on this one question all the time: are we truly happy in whatever we do, all the time? A normal person would believe “Sure! Why not?”, but the reality has been somewhat pointing to the opposite of that. Most of the times. We can never seem to stay happy for long periods, even after achieving all that we wanted. People want money; they become millionaires. Yet they don’t seem happy, at least it feels like something is still missing for them. Similarly, some people want a woman in their life, they end up getting married, then also they don’t seem happy… is there always some reason or the other which conjures itself, and makes us stress even more? This is what is complicated: we cannot fully achieve happiness, but always have this hope that all things will work out in the end if we follow this straight path; spoiler: there are a LOT of hurdles ahead, and a lot of unpredictability.

So what’s the big idea here? We can’t be happy? Is there some genetic predisposition that leads us into a wild goose chase? I don’t know for myself. But you can figure that out for yourself, after all, each of us have our own ways of figuring out what is our purpose and what we want. It’s your life; do whatever you want with it, for all of us are bound to end up at the same place no matter how different the path to that final destination is.