Why is absolute happiness a myth?

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Jonah Lester
Why is absolute happiness a myth?

Can you imagine living happily all the time? Sooner or later you will begin to miss the natural setbacks in life. Problems not only present unpleasant or uncomfortable situations, they also build character and develop our ability to resolve..

As much as we want to retain those moments of joy as if we wanted to live inside a photograph, we must learn to be aware of their ephemeral nature. The demand for happiness is an addiction to feeling good, it is to pretend that fleeting joys stay with you for all eternity without seeing that the true beauty of feeling good is knowing what will happen and others will come. The amusement. Permanent happiness is precisely an invention of the unhappy, it is the simple and elemental joy projected in time.

Those who seek to be happy at all costs, end up putting aside the spice of life: the now. Hoping for the extraordinary, they forget the mundane.

Be realistic and you will be happy

Kant affirmed that happiness is the satisfaction of all our needs, that is, a happiness that is as unattainable as it is distressing because we would live in a state of constant frustration. This idealized happiness, paradoxically, becomes an aversive, since calm is lost in the face of a disproportionate and especially rigid conceptual demand.

"All needs" is a lot to ask for beings as imperfect as us. Certainty only exists outside of this world and, unless we follow Pascal, most expect to feel good here on earth: if to be happy you must wait for another life, then there is no point in asking how you want to have a good time in this one. The search for happiness is an aspiration that accompanies the human being from its origins, even if we have given it different qualifiers throughout history.

Man, consciously or unconsciously, feels driven, both towards voluptuous pleasure and towards tranquility of the soul, serene exhilaration and a well-being that goes beyond the immediate turbulence of sensations. The Greeks called her: eudaimonism.

It would be necessary to wonder if when we speak of happiness we are talking about a state, a place to which one must arrive, a Nirvana, or if we are rather referring to a process and a path to travel, obviously with its inevitable ups and downs. A more realistic attitude about happiness would imply assuming two premises:

  1. Happiness is not found in goals but in the way to achieve them.
  2. Happiness does not respond to the principle of all or nothing (you can be happier or less happy).

A question that has not yet been adequately resolved refers to whether happiness is generated more by receiving positive stimuli or by eliminating negative stimuli..

According to experts on the subject, when individuals answer that they are happy in the surveys, this does not mean that they are constantly happy and full, but that they are not unhappy. If someone has been through adverse times and has consequently felt deeply depressed and depressed, they will appreciate not feeling that way in the future.

In other words, they claim that, in reality, if we are a little less unhappy and less foolish, we should 'settle', since, accordingly, absolute happiness is a myth. Those who "desperately seek happiness" end up being unhappy, since pursuing it as a matter of life and death generates frustration and anxiety, because we never manage to appropriate it definitively.

Finally, a third aspect arises when the relationships between desire and happiness are studied. According to Hobbes, human beings always want more and cannot live without wanting, but since desire is lack, we will only be motivated if we lack something. In other words, If happiness is the obtaining of all my wishes, what will keep my will to live, after obtaining them? Where would we find rest? Because if so, one should always be looking to the future, when what the most serious spiritual and philosophical traditions attest is that hethe serenity that accompanies happiness is only obtained in the present.

In other words, the recommended strategy is to bring desire to the here and now and remove the temporal connotation: wanting (enjoying) what you have and what you are doing.


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