About being happy through the centuries.
About being happy was not planned as a topic. But I promised a co-blogger, M, whose work I particularly admire, that I would write a few thoughts on the topic of being happy. Which of course can be seen as arrogance and I would therefore like to apologize for it in advance if this is the case. However, I would like to point out that I had the opportunity to study the topic intensively for quite some time. [1] Of course, these can only be fragments of thoughts to reflect on. But maybe one or two of them will be helpful – or fun.
If someone feels fundamentally happy, there is no reason to read this somewhat lengthy text.
And yet I think that if this is not the case or if we generally like to reflect on happiness or unhappiness, which are basically the same thing, a kind of feeling of happiness can arise for one or the other.
The current Mood
When we look at the many aspects of our current lives and interactions, we get the impression that a large portion of the population is unhappy. People may give different reasons for this. Since we live in a materialistic society, many people think that their personal lack of money is the reason for them to feel unhappy. But if that were the case, the super-rich wouldn’t need psychotherapists, drugs, or sleeping pills. Without wanting to go into detail, what account balance would we be happy with? 1, 2, 100 million? And then we would have enough and be happy? Permanently happy? It will be more likely that we will want to be billionaires. Sure you heard about support groups for unhappy lottery millionaires. So that alone is not enough of an explanation. “But finding the “right” partner, that would be it!” Or social success. Or, or, or.
If one of the richest people in the world is divorced three times and regularly takes drugs, and it’s not about the occasional joint or funny mushrooms to relax, the reasons for this lifestyle are probably not excessive happiness. [2]
Unhappiness as an engine of the economy
We should fundamentally be aware that unhappiness is a very lucrative business model. If you are happy and satisfied, you will not want to buy anything from me. But if I can convince you that you are unhappy because, for example, you drive an old car model that is mega-out, and even your worthless neighbor drives a better car, my chances of selling a new car increase significantly. The same applies to your bald head or your wine cellar. Your unhappiness is my profit. Guess how I’m going to set up my advertising campaign.
When we reflect on the word “happiness”, we will notice that it is a very vague term. Someone may feel happy because the sun is shining today, because the grandchildren are visiting, or because there is no bill in the mailbox today. Some define those as “moments of happiness” only. Well, enough moments of happiness can also make a happy life. How we think about happiness can also depend on our culture, our gender, our social environment, and even our genes. Still, it’s our thoughts.
Thinking as the foundation of happiness
If we realize that none of us really knows anything, but that we only have opinions, it can help us to recognize why so many feel unhappy and feel that coexistence used to work so much better before. Or think so. It’s always about thinking.
Some opinions may be better founded or less so, but they remain opinions, regardless of which lobby groups or other opinion makers try to sell them to us as truth. [3]
If we can fundamentally accept the statement that only we are to decide whether we are happy or not, which I very much hope we do, then it is obvious that our thinking plays a central role in this.
The seed
Different cultures and therefore also their philosophies have thought about this for centuries. If we analyze it more closely, we notice that one basic concept can be identified in some of them and I personally find this to be a very solid and helpful basis:
Watch your thoughts – they will become your words.
Watch your words – they will become your deeds.
Watch your deeds – they will become a habit.
Watch your habits – they will become your character.
Watch your character – it will be your destiny.
Let’s look at the horse from the tail: Our “destiny” would be, for example, unhappiness, as a more or less permanent state. And it becomes clear when we go back through the family tree that the seeds of this basic mood lie in our thoughts.
The moment we stop feeding bad thoughts (dissatisfaction, hatred, envy, revenge, divisiveness…), they will no longer shape our inner and outer dialogues and thus lose their power – down to our “destiny”. It can’t be any other way. Because what does not appear in our thinking cannot define our being.
Gratitude and Happiness
“But how can I think “good” when this and that in my life is simply miserable?” Here, too, it is our “thinking” in the broadest sense that decides. A tried and tested tool for shifting focus is gratitude. A particularly powerful tool.
“Everything around me seems to be conspiring against me“. This doesn’t need any examples because we all know these days. But the moment I sit down and think about what I can be grateful for in the Here and Now, I shift my focus. Unpaid bills, arguments with partners or children, strange pain here again – could this be cancer?
Here and now I am grateful for (and now something concrete, which may be different for each of us): I’m grateful that I live in a warm home, that I don’t go hungry, that I can get up in the morning and put my pants on myself… If you take the time to be grateful, you’ll quickly come up with a different level of perception and thus the solution to the tasks at hand can be approached from a different level of perception. (Just to think in categories such as “tasks” or “problems” changes our everyday life. We all know that. And many have also experienced that if we willingly accept and solve difficult challenges, we might feel very happy.)
The best time to be happy
Well, actually there is only one time to be happy, NOW. The Now is the only moment in which we live and therefore can be happy. Happiness in the past is a mental construct. We filter out something that we remember or even identify with and which, upon closer inspection, would often not hold up with our current thinking about happiness. Happiness in the future is also just a mental construct: “When I get through this annoying school, I’ll be happy”. When I’m finally away from home, when I’m finally married to my dream partner. Well. When the children are out of the house, when I’m retired, or when I get this perfect place in the retirement home. Or when I’m in heaven. They are all mental constructs that usually do not hold up in reality.
Choose the best only
In my view, our orientation towards guidelines, ideals – or, if you need them, teachers – is inextricably linked to our thoughts too. If I want to do something good for myself, and that should be the basic attitude, then only the best is good enough for me. If I want to move from the feeling of unhappiness to a state of happiness and need mental help to do so, only the best teachers – in the broadest sense – will come into question. Why should I waste my precious time with some questionable “happiness influencers” trying to sell me their book or their happiness incense sticks or -socks? What useful information can I learn from someone whose flatscreen is bigger than their bookshelf?
The topic of happiness as such is as old as humanity and only the thoughts on it that have survived over the centuries are precious – the unsuitable thoughts have since disappeared. Or rather, I can still read about them in history books.
Where can I find happiness?
Would I like to be able to dance like John Travolta? Certainly! If I haven’t managed that with my two left feet by now, the chances aren’t too good though. But nobody stops me from feeling happy when I feel my dance partner in my arms. And especially when I didn’t step on her toes once.
Very often one simple thing stands in the way of our happiness: we are looking in the wrong place. For example, in areas that are brought to us from outside. Or that we assume that we only have to be this or that, look or think this or that. So it’s an important and at the same time difficult step to recognize what suits us. There is no such thing as “one size fits all”.
Religions, Beliefs, and Concepts
If someone gets along well with religions, they can certainly be an effective tool. Personally, I have problems with monotheistic religions, simply because by definition they cannot be the highest thoughts. Period. When I say that “my” God is the only good one, doesn’t tolerate anyone next to him, and therefore “your” God is bad, that is a way of thinking that divides us. And which – as we have all learned from history – can cause us to smash each other’s skulls for centuries because of it. This cannot be the highest principle. The same applies, of course, to “my” culture versus “your” culture and all other forms of thinking that place what separates above what unites.
In my personal current state of knowledge, I consider Zen to be the highest form of knowledge (because Zen also names the obstacles to happiness, such as dualistic thinking and ego-centeredness) and Daoism to be the highest principle for coexistence, since it is limitless, unrestrictedly valid, and also includes areas such as coexistence with nature, even the cosmos. But these are not the only concepts that work and if one were to conclude that they were the only correct ones, they are no longer so. For many people, they may be too esoteric, and for some too far away from their own point of view, and getting closer to these concepts also takes time and will.
There are many teachers
The ancient Greeks or Romans, especially the Stoics, would be closer for many for whom Asian wisdom on the subject of happiness is too far away. By the way, the Stoics come very close to Daoist thinking and are therefore an easy way for some people to reflect on the topic of happiness. But here too we are back to “choosing only the best”, which are philosophers like Marcus Aurelius or Seneca.
Not everyone wants or can deal with lengthy philosophical perspectives, which of course shouldn’t be a problem. A good alternative could be to read aphorisms from important people of the past on this topic, but above all to reflect on them. A sentence in a day is more than reading a book in one sitting. But we all know that.
There are so many useful aphorisms about this topic of happiness and I would like to pick out a few that seem very appropriate to me or underline what has been said above.
Aphorism
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence”. – Aristotle
“Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions”. -Dalai Lama XIV
“The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness”. – William Saroyan
“Happiness is not a destination, it’s a journey. Happiness is not tomorrow, it is now. Happiness is not a dependency, it is a decision. Happiness is what you are, not what you have”. – Zig Ziglar, summarizing several great thinkers).
“Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Friedrich Nietzsche had a lot to say about happiness. Still, one of his most famous aphorisms on the subject is this. “Happiness is the feeling that power increases – that resistance is being overcome”.
With all that said, one could wrongly conclude that intellectual knowledge is required to be happy. Therefore, the following quote, also from Nietzsche, is the best for me personally, and it has accompanied me since c. 50 years:
“He who has an abundance of joy must be a good person. He is not necessarily the smartest, although he achieves exactly what the smart man strives for with all his cleverness.”
extra
And for everyone who misses the Zen aspect of the matter, a Zen Buddhist joke at the end:
Three novices praise their teachers. One Zen novice said, “My teacher is the best. He can go days without eating.”
The second said, “My teacher has so much self-control, he can go days without sleeping.”
The third said, “My teacher is so wise that he eats when he’s hungry and sleeps when he’s tired.”
And how does Alfred Hitchcock define happiness?
footnotes:
[1] I studied anthropology as a minor and one topic that particularly interested me was the topic of happiness in other cultures. Many years ago I ran seminars for managers and salespeople. Dissatisfaction was often a theme among the participants, but also unhappiness was a basic attitude. The observations I made back then made me a learner myself. Learning from SE-Asian thought on the subject came later.
[2] Of course, he is just one example from the world of business.
Politics: A president for whom “ME” and “I” are central terms and who now spends more time in the courtroom than on the golf course would not immediately come to mind when discussing happiness.
Celebrity: The many unhappy Hollywood stars who regularly have to call the doctor to get off the cocaine high. And, and, and.
[3] It wasn’t that long ago that we were sold that the earth was flat or that the sun revolved around the earth. And your head would sit wobbly if you didn’t see things quite so simply. And today? Space telescopes alone prove to us every day that we cannot even begin to understand 95% or so of the universe. What else don’t we know?
I found the illustrations in the article online and they do not have any sources that I can cite.
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