Happiness and misunderstood Pursuit of Happiness

I was startled to know that many dictionaries define pursuit as to “chase with hostility”.  Do we pursue happiness with hostility? I was amused by this. This led me to do a small research on happiness and pursuit of happiness. No credit has to be given to me for this article. I only aggregated the relevant data so that readers would be benefitted by the content.

The Father of psychology Sigmund Freud said “Pursuit of happiness is a doomed quest. The intention that man should be happy was not included in the plan of creation.”  J

Come on it can’t be like that. We all want happiness. We do not want to be like some French intellectuals who think that happiness is not at all interesting. J It seems they raised a controversy over an essay on happiness written by Matthie Ricard, a Buddhist Monk, sometimes called ‘happiest man in the world”. They asked him not to impose dirty work of happiness. They said, “We don’t care about being happy. We like ups and downs of life. We like suffering because it’s so good when it ceases for a while” J

I hope none of us think that way. I am sure none of us here wakes up in the morning thinking, “I want to suffer the whole day”. Consciously or not, whatever we do somehow is related to a deep, profound desire for well-being or happiness. Every man wants to be happy, but in order to be so he needs first to understand what happiness is.

If you look at literature, you will find different definitions of happiness. Some people say happiness is right now; it’s the quality of the freshness of present moment. Some say happiness is state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment. And all this led someone to say that scholars intentionally left the definition of happiness vague so that each individual could interpret it in his own way. It could be right and we all define happiness the way we find happiness.

Initially the psychologists thought happiness and unhappiness were end points of a single continuum. That made Freud say that, as one becomes less miserable, one gets happier. Only recent developments of science of happiness in the west deduce that Happiness and unhappiness are not the end points of a single continuum. When you get less miserable, you get less miserable. And that happiness is a whole other end of equation.

Our Indian spiritual definition of happiness always accommodated this fact. Just consider one definition: ‘happiness is deep sense of serenity and fulfillment, a state actually pervades and underlies all emotional states and all the joys and sorrows that come one’s way.’

Is it surprising? Can we have this kind of well-being feeling even in the midst of misery? If we give deep thought to his definition of happiness, we will realize that it is not about finding happiness but it is about feeling happiness. And that we can feel happiness in any state of mind if we change the ways we ‘pursue happiness’. 

The issue at the heart of misconception about ‘pursuit of happiness’ is that, we often focus on the pursuit of happiness as if happiness is something that we have to go out and get, an object we are supposed to get. We think that if we could gather this and that we will be happy. We say ‘everything to be happy – to have everything to be happy’. That very sentence already reveals the doom of destruction of happiness. If we miss something, it collapses. And also, when things go wrong we try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often illusory.

We can think of our pursuit of happiness to be following 'if-then model'. If I can get 40 % hike, I will be happy.  If my Boss gets heart attack, I will be happy. The ‘If’ we were focusing 10 years ago might have got fulfilled. But now we will have another set of ‘If’s for us to postpone feeling happiness.

If you call happiness equation as Happiness = (wanting what you have) divided by (having what you want) most of us here spend more of our time in the bottom half of this equation.

So what could be the right way to pursue happiness? I must admit that I do not have authority to prescribe how exactly one should go about finding happiness. I am just putting forward what I think could possibly be the right way. May be some of us would have experienced deep happiness when we relaxed beside a wonderful, serene lake. Had we thought if the color of water was bluish, we would never have experienced the same happiness. So key to happiness lies in discarding our ‘if-then’ model and accepting and enjoying the present. I am not advocating that one must not dream and have ambitions. All I am saying is that one need not postpone happiness waiting for their fulfillment.

Rabbi Hyman Schachtel in his book “The real enjoyment of Living” suggested that Happiness is not about having what you want. Instead it is about wanting what you have. I shall not speak more on this line for two reasons. 1. I have already given clue as to what could be more appropriate way. 2.  May be it is better left vague so that people find their own way to find happiness, equipped with right basics. I will leave you all with a story I came across in this pursuit of mine, which made a deep impression on me.

It is said when Dalai Lama was once in Portugal and got amused by all the big construction of buildings that was going everywhere. One evening he said “Look, you are doing all these things, but isn’t it nice, also, to build something within? “. And he said, “unless that you even if you get high-tech flat on the 100^th floor of a super-modern and comfortable building, if you are deeply unhappy within, all you are going to look for is a window from which you can jump out.”