I’ve been contemplating the nature of happiness for a while now, and the more I think about it the bigger it gets.
I've come to the conclusion that the pursuit of happiness is a dangerous addiction.
And I have to say ... I feel much better now ... though it's very hard to explain.
So let's see if I can make this work ...
For almost all of us, particularly in the West, happiness is a cultural pivot - a driving principle of our lives. Read any tabloid newspaper and tunnel down to the central notion within each of the articles about fame, success, wealth, divorce, crime - and you'll find the pursuit of happiness as a principle criterion.
And it’s been this way since the ‘60’s when happiness supplanted other life motivations like duty, service and religion.
Yes indeed, there was a time when such things were considered more important than individual happiness - where the notion of 'self-sacrifice' was all important and the pursuit of happiness was considered a decadent personal trait.
But we got rich in the '60's and things changed. And that's entirely natural. The pursuit of happiness has always followed extraordinary prosperity in Western cultures - from ancient Rome to 1920’s England to post WWII America and more recently the entire pre-credit crisis world. Whenever we have easy money, people’s focus turns from survival issues to happiness.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, except for the parallel fact that at no time in our history has unhappiness and depression related illness been so ubiquitous as now, when the pursuit of happiness is at its most frantic, and pervasive.
So I’m wondering what is it about the pursuit of happiness that creates its opposite.
But first I should define the kind of happiness I’m talking about.
I’m talking about manic happiness - that Disneyland, ‘oh what a beautiful morning’, whooping, jumping up and down,‘everything is wonderful’ kind of happiness. The excited kind of happiness we’re sold in advertisements and on TV as the optimum state of being.
For most of my life this culture of manic happiness has been everywhere - everywhere it seems, but in people’s hearts - because when I look around at friends and acquaintances, though most are in almost continuous pursuit of happiness, with money, holidays, cars and homes, pets, children and god knows what else - most are profoundly unhappy with their lives and with life itself.
The worst part of it is, we’re constantly sold the notion that if we’ve not excited and happy - like, grinning like a lunatic - then we’re not as alive as we should be - which creates this terrible compulsion for people to at least LOOK like they’re happy.
I saw it a lot when I was in the United states, where it seems as if the culture of individual happiness has been taken to an extreme - people grinning all the time even when you know they feel like dogshit on an icy road - that frantic grin many of them have that doesn’t reach their eyes.
It’s frightening to behold, because it seems to come with a weird disconnect between what their mouth is doing and the signals their face is sending - like, on a financial program I saw, there was this newly bankrupted company directer coming out of an administrators meeting - and on being asked how he felt, he grinned frighteningly into the camera and said, “Me? Ohhh, Ahm just starting’ to have fun.” And what I remember were his eyes. They were terrified, as if he was looking into an abyss a second before falling.
Such pressure to at least look happy - its exhausting.
But then, a huge part of the cult of America is to do with this requirement of happiness - the pursuit of happiness is even in their declaration of independence. But Americans have taken it further - they expect happiness as a right, as a rule of life even -like, they have to be happy and if they aren’t, something must be wrong.
And we Australians are not far behind.
We too have a culture of happiness - perhaps not as frantic as the Yanks, but nevertheless, it’s there. Throughout our entire lives, happiness is THE central issue of our life by which things, events and people are judged by their potential to deliver it to us.
And it's got to the point where very little else is considered
We’re this way because it’s the way we were brought up - us baby boomers and their offspring, anyway.
And even though our parents had service and duty more deeply imprinted into their characters, nevertheless, they were still devoted to creating a world in which the pursuit of happiness could become the main object of life. This is what they fought for - and I suppose it could be said that the last few thousand years of human history in the west - since the great ancient empires of the West - we’ve all been devoted to the getting of happiness.
It’s probably genetically imprinted within us now, each generation selling it to the other.
Our parents sold happiness to us when they encouraged us to be happy, implying that if we weren’t then something was wrong. The notion of 'having fun, life should be a holiday' largely comes from family.
Then our schools sold happiness to us by favoring extroverted smiling images of the ‘perfect student’ (check out every private school advertisement - all big smiles, jumping and laughing. The image of the victorious footie team pumping the air with their fists and whooping - happiness in success. Happiness in striving to win.
Not to mention the continuous propagation of the cultural sub-text - that is, the key to ‘HAPPINESS’ is to work hard, be good, obey your betters, get married and have kids.
When in groups we’re obliged to be happy (don’t be a ‘downer’). If we’re not smiling we’re asked, ‘why the long face?”
People apologize for crying, or expressing unhappiness, and are made to feel wrong if they become depressed.
And if that’s not enough, to hammer it in, the media keeps selling this tedious subtext of happiness to us. Everywhere we go, on billboards, radio, TV and print, there’s the constant, stupid notion that every product we DON’T yet have, is all we need for happiness.
The whole bigger and better, onwards and outwards mythology of our culture is driven by the pursuit of excitement and happiness - the need for the new and unique in every form of consumption, from travel to TV shows to food - all to make us squeal with happiness. The pressure is constant and utterly insidious, such that our entire life's purpose is reduced to the pursuit happiness and its siblings, fun and excitement.
I suppose in this happiness thing, I'm a bit like a reformed alchoholic - because I did take it to extremes ... happiness I mean.
When I was a kid, I developed a powerful happiness addiction, simply because I was so utterly thwarted and depressed. Too complicated to go into, but like most unhappy kids, my beleaguered parents were largely to blame because they weren’t delivering to me the happiness I was conditioned to expect.
They weren’t like all the other ‘normal’ parents - we weren’t rich, didn’t have TV or a nice house, and Dad was very eccentric which embarrassed the hell out of me - coz he wasn’t normal - because like most children, I equated ‘normality’ with happiness. As such, I had the mistaken impression that all the other kids were having the happy childhood I SHOULD have been having, simply because their parents looked normal.
The notion of ‘normality as happiness’ was another value we all were sold by the prevailing conditioning of our culture.
But anyway ... as children, I think we all form a ‘happiness dream’ - a vision of how it’s going to be different for us - how we’re going to find the happiness that has seemed to elude our parents.
For me, the happiness dream was connected to the dream of escape - that magical day when I would leave home and finally be free to do all things that made me happy.
So when that time eventually came, I went into full-time manufacturing of happiness, in the most direct way - sex, drugs and rock and roll. I drank too much, took drugs, went to every party I could find and slept with every girl who would have me.
And I was very, very happy.
So intense was this happiness, there was nothing else I was interested in except the making of happiness. I served no-one, had no sense of duty, and couldn’t give a damn about anything except my happiness. Daytime and jobs were simply downtime in which to recover from hangovers and make enough money so I could do it all over again that night.
So it was no surprise that I would end up in a band - happiness machines, in which the out of control, beautiful, drug-fucked rock star was the epitome of happiness for every teenage of the day (70’s and 80’s).
So the manufacturing of happiness went on.
We had a bit of success - enough to be happy anyway. We were played on the radio and television, toured and went overseas, recorded, signed autographs, made money.
I should have been happy.
But in actual fact, the cliché was the case - the more happiness I got the more miserable I became. And it was made all the more tragic by my knowledge that, logically speaking, with all I had, I should be wildly happy and excited. But I wasn’t. So not only was I unhappy, but I was terribly unhappy about being unhappy - because it was utterly unjustifiable.
Like, I didn't have the RIGHT to be unhappy.
Stupid, stupid stupid. But then, I was an idiot in those days, so I didn't know any better.
So that’s part of the reason I ended up in a monastery meditating for months on end.
Originally I went to seek the source of my unhappiness - to work all the bugs in my system - so I could be happy.
Silly me.
I didn’t know it then, but to meditate with any expectation at all, whether of happiness or enlightenment only creates a mind that is constantly seeking, and not meditating - which creates anxiety.
And to meditate anxiously is a sure way of turning the meditation into a very unpleasant experience.
So meditation only made me MORE unhappy!
And I felt betrayed. All the peace, calm and happiness I had been lead to believe that meditation was supposed to create for me - it wasn’t happening!
So I tried harder, meditating anxiously until I was a tight ball of frazzle - grasping at every moment of calm, every moment of peace in the hope that HERE IT IS!! ... only to see it evaporate even as a grasped it, and once more collapse into the dark, pain filled hell I was making of meditation.
Those first months in the monastery were simply awful - all because I couldn’t let go of my expectation that it would lead me to happiness.
Though I didn’t know it then, meditation was teaching me a valuable lesson - becoming a mirror of my life, in which my constant grasping for happiness was driving me mad with anxiety. So it was inevitable that, meditating as stupidly as I was, I would eventually crack beneath the pressure.
And that moment when it came, changed my life.
One stormy night, while sitting sweating on the bench in anxious knots defiantly meditating, though every cell in my body craved for me to stop and run away from the monastery - at a point of utter despair, I had a realization.
I realized I would NEVER be happy.
And in that luminescent moment, I gave up all my expectations of happiness.
And the relief I felt in my mind, and in my body, was like flying. I felt as light as the air, and my heart became calm.
And all the neuronal skitters in my head, that had been dedicated to the getting of happiness, they all dissolved, leaving empty space.
And in that space there was no happiness.
But there was no unhappiness either.
It was empty. And the emptiness was tranquil and deep. And I realized then that throughout my entire life to that point, happiness had made me its slave - and I was now free.
Like any junkie, most of us are addicted to endorphins, those subtle but powerful opiates of happiness. And if we can’t get the drug from everyday life, we drink alcohol, take drugs, have sex, bungee jump, have parties, travel to exotic places, and all the other happiness things.
Thing is - animals, reptiles, birds and insects - they don’t have the addiction to happiness that we do. When they aren’t happy, they don’t pine for it, or try to manufacture happiness. If they’re depressed, they be depressed - and if they’re happy, then they’re wonderfully happy. Happiness and unhappiness come and go like the sun and rain, and however they are feeling - they behave with grace and wisdom - resting if they’re depressed, celebrating when they’re happy.
But us?
We’re so terrified of unhappiness we immediately start worrying if it’s not present, which only makes it worse. Then we hate it for not being here, which only creates its opposite - unhappiness ... and so on.
We feel betrayed by life if we aren’t happy, so we’re either running after the mirage of happiness, or running away from its opposite, whichever it might be - sadness, grief, unhappiness, depression and so on.
Not only that, but our yearning for happiness makes us susceptible to control by ‘happiness manufacturers’ - politicians, corporations, religion - every snake oil salesman trying to sell us something. They'll all promise heaven, and be believed simply because people WANT to believe that perfect happiness exists ... somewhere ... usually somewhere where they aren't ... but where they have to get to in some way.
So I think we should bugger happiness off. Get rid of it. And Fun. Chuck that out too.
Maybe then the human race might stop running the happiness marathon - settle down and take stock. Have a holiday. Lie in the sun and weep about all the things we never wept about but should have. Give something away. Talk to a neighbor about compost. Look at an ant.
Do sweet nothing and not give a damn if we feel happy or bloody awful.
Because whatever we feel, it's all so very sweet.
The friction of life. Whether suffering or bliss, it's always fascinating.
CYA
