Happiness is a Warm Loaded Gun...

Greetings from Thailand! (not sure who I'm greeting, I think I'm the only one who reads this blog!!) I just finished a four day motorbike tour in Northern Thailand with my motorcycle gang (OK, I ride a scooter). We had a few good conversations along the way but one conversation in particular on our final day stuck with me that I would like to expand upon.

We were talking about "happiness" and how it can be achieved and I was spewing my "Way to Love" stuff about how happiness comes from within and it is hope in and desire for external things (whether it be material objects, people, a job, etc) that causes unhappiness. Despite making some valid points, the guys didn't buy it and after considering their responses, I don't think I buy it either.
How could the external world not influence an individual's happiness? First of all, we are all biologically and socially programmed to desire certain things. Even if you could somehow overcome this programming (potentially impossible) wouldn't external reality still influence your life? Also, if this idea of unity in all things (the "One") holds any truth (and I believe it does) then this "you" that is happy or unhappy is not limited to the spatial confines of your physical body. I am still somewhat of a solipsist though, so for me, "I" is the symphony of spatio-temporal reality in which I-the body/mind exerts an influence (if I take a stone and throw it in the ocean, I've influenced the world's oceans, maybe the atmosphere, etc). But beyond these intellectual problems with happiness being totally internal, there are definitely some pretty powerful experiential ones.

Certainly I am much happier when I am doing something that I enjoy with the people that I love than I am when I am sick and doing something which I detest. And it is impossibly easy to think up life situations for which happiness would be easier or harder to achieve.

The trouble with attributing happiness to external factors is that people tend to want to create a linear formula, such as more money = greater happiness. It is here that I think the idea of happiness coming from within can be very useful. Instead of saying "Oh, if I only had ______ I could be happy," [insert: new car, beautiful girlfriend, new job, etc] people must first look to themselves as the main source of their own happiness. Once you look at yourself you will better be able to identify the external sources in your life which impact your happiness. For example, maybe your job doesn't make you happy, maybe it produces the opposite effect or maybe you realize that you find a certain activity enjoyable. At any rate, only upon examining yourself will you be able to make the necessary internal and external adjustments to put yourself on the path to happiness.

I must offer a disclaimer regarding happiness: Happiness, though a worthwhile pursuit, is not an end in itself, nor is it something which can be "achieved." In fact, happiness without its inverse (sadness) is nothing and the two form a sort of dualistic unity. There is always (and must always be) unhappiness; though certainly unpleasurable, it is not "bad" and is always necessary.

All emotion we experience is only experienced as a deviation from the mean. If your entire life existed with precisely the same external inputs, we would have neither happiness or sadness (or boredom either, which requires the perspective of a different experience to exist).

It is for this reason that happiness requires sadness. Our highest high only means something in relation to our lowest low and vice versa. If you consider a sine wave running along the x-axis (with happiness being the y-value and time the x-value) a happy moment would be registered as the line running above the x-axis and a sad moment would run below the axis. This method allows an accounting of the degree of happiness as well (the further from the axis, the greater the degree of emotion). But a normal sine wave is quite boring and reality is never as simple. Most people's lives change a great deal over time and their general happiness (say, the level of their mean (average) happiness) can increase or decrease over time. Many people seem to get progressively less happy as they grow older so their graph might not be level but would be sloping downward. Over time, if this downward trend continues, their mean would continuously creep downward as well (at a rate determined by the rate of their decline). Here, the x-axis would no longer be the mean as it is with a plain sine wave, it is merely the starting point. The mean continuously changes with respect to the current level of happiness. This person could still experience "happiness" if their current happiness level rose above the mean though unless it rose to its initial height (the highest previous point) they would still remember a time when they were happier.

So if happiness is all about deviation from the mean, then what is the point of worrying about it? Well, just as someone can get progressively unhappier, they could just as well get progressively happier. Take a line rising diagonally toward the right, the person whose unhappiness graph looked like this would always be getting progressively happier. In the past, they would have experience some instances in which they were happy at the time (above the mean) but upon reflection (and after raising their mean) they realize that they now know greater happiness.

So then, if it is possible to increase your happiness over time, how can it be done? If you value something like money, than you will always want more (because you can always have more) and your graph could likely be downward sloping. If you value something like learning, you could spend the majority of your lifetime in its pursuit quite happily (and raising your mean), though as anyone who has met an elderly person distressed by their mental decline would know, eventually this could lead to tremendous unhappiness.

I think then, that the trick is to value experience--the "good" and the "bad" alike. Experience is something that you will always be guaranteed to have and will always be acquiring (even the experience of gaining or losing money or of going senile is an experience) and you can never have any more of it or less of it. It is possible for someone to have more varied experiences than another, but only if value is placed on variety will this impact their happiness (this is something that I am guilty of, so I better keep changing it up!). But even the "bad" experiences such as having your heart broken, getting fired from a job, etc, seem to make sense or even have been necessary in hindsight. At any rate, whether all of your experiences make sense or not they certainly led to the you that exists right here and now. So--bringing it all together--if you are happy with yourself than you can recognize and appreciate the value of your experiences.

Happiness then, is a self feeding loop (rather than some linear map that I've made it out to be) that necessarily involves unhappiness but can always move forward--provided that you enjoy the ride!!