Happiness

I have always wondered if there is more to happiness than we realize. I see that the most creative people seem to be those who are profoundly unhappy or have lives that lead them to despair! So are happiness and creativeness incompatible?

Aristotle claimed that happiness is always the ultimate purpose of life. Aristotle’s argument is that if you ask anyone “why do you do what you do?”, and you keep asking the question “yes, but why do you do X” to their answer X, then ultimately they will say “because it makes me happy”. It is the only purpose that appears to be an end in itself.  

As far as happiness goes, most people can be categorized as follows:

1.     Unhappy (small number of people)

2.     Mildly Content (majority of people)

3.     Extreme Happiness or Ecstasy (small number of people)

Research shows that for “Mildly Content” people their happiness is relatively stable over time. But people who experience extreme happiness are more likely in a years time to be unhappy. Intensely happy people often have a roller coaster ride to happiness with intense highs and intense lows. 

Thus one can argue that the first secret to happiness is not to pursue intense happiness but to pursue mild contentment. Advertising and the media want to promote intense happy experiences to get our attention. They are encouraging us to be extremely happy and are ultimately causing our unhappiness.

There are two main types of happiness

1.            Hedonistic based happiness (type 1 happiness). For example the feeling you get after a            glass of wine, or after watching a great movie. Its relatively short lived and roughly lasts          about 15 minutes.

2.            Satisfaction/Accomplishment based happiness. (type 2 happiness). For example looking          back over your accomplishments and getting that feeling of satisfaction. e.g. People               who devote their lives to a cause. It is a more long lasting type of happiness in general.

The second secret to happiness is to pursue experiential happiness and also accomplishment based happiness at the same time”. Happiness has a lot to do with who we compare ourselves with. Some research at the Barcelona Olympic games found that bronze medal winners were more happy on average than the silver medal winners. It is explained by who the medal winners were comparing themselves to. Bronze medal winners compare themselves with the people who didn’t get medals. Whereas the silver medal winners were comparing themselves with the gold winners. Therefore the bronze winners felt happier than the silver winners. Similarly a lot of advertising is directed at getting us to compare our possessions with the possessions of others e.g. Your neighbor has a Porsche but you don’.  The “close shave” focuses your thinking into “what might of been” thinking i.e. a comparison. Psychologists called this “counter factual thinking”. It’s is another form of comparison to others.

The third secret to happiness is “beware and mindful of your ‘what might have been’ thinking as it will impact your happiness”. Imagination is one of the things that probably separates us from animals e.g. we can think “what might have been”.  Imagination is something we probably inherited as the result of evolution, because happiness motivates us to do all the things that ensure our survival. It’s a reward mechanism for survival behaviors that have an evolutionary purpose e.g. eating, sex, competing with others for survival. It also explains why there is a point to “unhappiness”. Anxiety, fear and other “unhappy” emotions actually made a lot of evolutionary sense in the past when we were also prey. Evolution effectively says that the continuation of life itself is the purpose of life. So both happiness and unhappiness are both useful emotions to ensure life prevails.

But in recent years there are some who argue that we are now suffering from an excess of it. Coming out as “depressed” has become all the rage—among cricketers, footballers, even surfers. This spread of depression is partly a side-effect of our addiction to happiness. Conversely, understanding why we are so miserable should liberate us from being too miserable about it. We can feel good about feeling bad. In other words, we need a decent philosophy of failure to save everyone from thinking what failures they are.

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud argues that there are three reasons we are so miserable and they all have something to do with disappointed expectations. His enemies of happiness are: (a) religion, especially Christianity for pushing the idea of heaven; (b) 18th-century voyages of discovery—for raising unrealistic expectations of heaven on earth; (c) finally (so self-critically!) psychoanalysis itself, which seems to dangle in front of you the notion that everything can be fixed. One could add another: (d) the pharmaceutical industry (and illicit chemical cocktails similarly).

The notion that happiness is actually attainable belongs to the second half of the 18th century. Previously there had been a general consensus that no one can be called happy until he carries his happiness down to the grave in peace. Paradiso was strictly for the pages of Dante. In Greenland, for example, the Greenlanders bought into Christianity on account of its persuasive description of pain and suffering. The vale of tears was real. Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde (1771) stresses two things. First, that the Tahitians live a life of wellbeing, and don’t have to work too hard either. Second, that the women—and to some extent the men too—throw themselves willingly at French sailors, which adds significantly to the happiness of French sailors. There are of course darker strands to the narrative—Bougainville mentions at least one murder, and hints that in fact sexual bliss may actually have been obtained in exchange for a few nails or other useful items. But nevertheless, one can say that Bougainville was concerned less with the pursuit of happiness itself, than with the fact it had finally been located and lived out in the southern hemisphere. It was just a question of transporting the south back into the north. These traveller’s tales of transcendence had a powerful impact on subsequent thinkers. Freud, for one. His theory of the id and the ego transposes the 18th century map of the world, specifically the north/south divide, onto the map of the human psyche. The “southern” id was having all the fun—the pleasure principle—while the more northerly ego was reining in the hedonistic savage self with a good dose of the “reality principle.”

Charles Fourier, the great utopian philosopher who provided the blueprint for the communist society of the future, looked forward to unfaltering happiness and an age of “harmony” in the “phalanstery,” with mass adultery, public orgies and a sexual AA call-out service for anyone who is still really desperate. 

Albert Camus was equally alert to the tyranny of happiness. In his early work, The Myth of Sisyphus, he satirises the figure of Don Juan and the concept of the orgy, but in the very last line of the essay he asks us to imagine that Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock up the mountain, is “happy.” Conversely, he suggests (in his Carnets) that “we have to fall in love if only to provide an alibi for the random despair we were going to feel anyway”’ Whether you play football or go swimming or rock-rolling—or even write, something always goes wrong. Or, as Sartre, his long-time comrade and adversary, put it: “everything always goes wrong” (tout est voué à l’échec).

From Voltaire to Wittgenstein, the point of philosophy has been to pop the balloon of excessive optimism. “Many happy returns!” said his landlady to Wittgenstein on his birthday as he lay dying of cancer. “No there aren’t,” he replied tersely. Therefore, angst, despair, nausea: welcome! Get thee behind me Church of perpetual wellbeing (the “Wellness Syndrome,” as Carl Cederström puts it).

We all want to be happy and spend a lot of time and energy to avoid the pain that stems from sadness and suffering.  Go to any book shop and you will see hundreds of books all dedicated to helping us to avoid pain and suffering. There are also thousands of blogs and gurus providing just as many ways to “true happiness”.  But you ever stopped to think about the cost of happiness, the most important being the loss of creativity. As Eric Wilson points out: “Creating doesn’t make us unhappy; unhappiness makes us creative.”

In his book “Against Happiness”, he argues that without sadness there would no creativity, inventiveness, imagination, or philosophic thought.  Without melancholy society would lose it’s soul as people would not have the desire to look beyond their “happy state” to find new meaning in life in new experiences and as yet un-imagined existential states.  Professor Wilson argues that we need to embrace melancholia as a necessary and healthy state of life.

There are hundreds of examples of exceptionally creative melancholics throughout time– Abraham Lincoln, Cary Grant, Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill to name a few. Many writers and artists created their greatest works during times of melancholy and depression. For example singer Joni Mitchell once said: “Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it”. Recognizing the darker parts of herself was essential to recognizing the good.

Psychologist Carl Jung studied an ancient Taoist work called “The Secret of the Golden Flower” and concluded that two things that often appear to be opposites may actually be “independent manifestations of the same principle.”   For Jung, the underlying principle was the unconscious.

·       Ying and Yang

·       Darkness and Light

·       Female and Male

To Jung melancholy and sadness often lead to greater understanding, and are a necessary catalyst for insight and self-awareness.  There can be no “shaping of identity” without melancholy.

·       Doubt breeds knowledge

·       Brooding breeds enlightenment

·       Fear breeds strength

·       Worry breeds action

·       Melancholy breeds creativity

Melancholia allows us to see true beauty. As Keats points out “Pain is the muse of beauty.” Without it we would not be able to differentiate it from what is merely pretty.

A lot of our aversion to pain and suffering stems from our fear of death. Connecting to our melancholy helps us to recognize that everything is temporary and fleeting. Instead of escaping our fear of death we should confront it and explore it. By doing so we can more appreciate life’s beauty, brilliance and possibility. We become energized to live more fully and creatively.  It brings us back in touch with reality, but with a open mind of questioning, introspection, and invention.

In conclusion, constant happiness could be argued to be artificial and delusional. To truly experience life we must embrace the dualities of Life’s natural cycles of both darkness and light.

This was the last blog written by Anil K. Malhotra.  Our husband and father expired on August 22, 2014.  

On his behalf we thank all of his readers for their support and encouragement.  

-- the Malhotra family