Q & A

Q: What is the secret to happiness?



A: No one ever asks me this question directly. It usually pops up after I have bankrupted their illusions for them. This usually comes at the end of my canned lecture on the Greeks which is damn popular. The lecture is simply a Cliffs notes version of a book I have been meaning to write for sometime.



Everyone wants to be happy. The reason they aren't happy is because they don't know how to be happy. The reason people don't know how to be happy is because they don't know what happiness is. So, I will give the quick and dirty answer here.



Happiness is not an abundance of pleasure and an absence of pain. This is hedonism. If we agreed with hedonism, we would have to conclude that the happiest people on the planet are drug addicts. Yet, despite being blissed out on various substances, they strike us as miserable people.



Others seek a refined hedonism of the simple life. Our minimalist friends know this very well, but this path fails as well as people become bored and dissatisfied with this lifestyle. It also makes them intolerant of pain such that everything becomes more painful. No matter what your flavor of hedonism, it doesn't work.



Others seek a greater or higher purpose to serve. This might be religion or country or duty or simply one's family. This leads to disillusionment as we either fall for things that aren't real or become disappointed with the selfish aims of other people. Idealism merely turns to cynicism. Altruism and seeking after virtue leads to bitterness and despair. This is not happiness.



Others find happiness in giving up. They seek to stop caring, but this is just momentary relief since survival depends on us caring about things. You can tune out the world, stop reading the news, mind your own business, or whatnot. But the world is still there, and you are still in it. There is no vacation from reality.



All these paths have certain pieces of the happiness puzzle, but they are incomplete. They dance around what happiness really is. Happiness is simply living well. Happiness comes from living a life of meaningful activity. Happiness in a nutshell comes from work. Everything else is just pragmatism.



A truly happy person is someone who engages with the world and pursues their projects. They deal with the same bullshit the rest of us do, but they handle not with equanimity but magnanimity. They strive to overcome the setbacks, and it is in this striving that they find happiness or what we call "flow." To be happy is to flourish.



I find flow in my activities. This is primarily from work, my writing, my reading and my studies, and my interactions with coworkers and friends. Happiness is not a life free from pain or difficulty. In fact, happiness often depends on increasing our difficulties. This would be the challenge such as completing a chosen task or climbing a mountain.



This is how happiness relates to the other paths I outlined above. When it comes to pleasure and pain, they are indifferent. As such, you should be able to enjoy/endure both. This would be the ultrarunner who trains hard for a hundred miler and then retires for a few beers on the couch. Is this hedonism or masochism? It is both and neither. Similarly, the happy person must care about the things relevant to himself or herself but also be indifferent to other things. For instance, I care about political freedom, but I don't wait for it to come in order to live my life.



Happiness is both simple and complex. The simple thing is the direction and the goal. The difficult part is the journey. This is also person relative. Each person must learn to live well given their particular circumstances. For instance, I pursue writing because I am better at that than music or painting. Others may choose cooking, science, or whatever. Age, gender, and cultural background are also other factors to consider. There is infinite variety in this aspect of happiness, but the fundamental essence of happiness is normative and does not change. You find happiness in the pursuit of your activities.



The downside of the pursuit of happiness is frustration. This is where the pragmatism comes in and explains all those self-help gurus. All self-help advice tries to answer the problems that arise as we pursue our projects. All problems seem to involve time, money, and energy. To a secondary extent, we have relationships. It is important to remember that happiness is not the absence of problems, frustrations, and the rest. This would be hedonism. You can have all sort of problems and setbacks and still experience happiness. For instance, if my computer died, this would be a setback to this project. But I would then go about fixing the computer or getting it replaced. This is simply another activity. I have already been through this and solving the problem was quite fun all things considered.



You can't solve other people's problems, and if I can give any advice, it would be to not involve yourself in other people's problems. This is the problem in all relationships. People don't know how to be happy. Consequently, they are unfit for any meaningful relationships. For them, their problems become a burden for other people to fix. These people tend to be hedonists or just stupid. You don't need these people in your life. Without a clue to the true path of happiness, they will always be in the shit. ALWAYS. This is why the only rational response to these people is benign indifference. As I pointed out before, you have to learn what to care about and not care about.



When you find someone who is truly happy and you are truly happy, the result is a multiplier effect. It is like the harmony you hear when Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young get together to sing. They sing quite well by themselves, but they sing even better together. This is what it is like when truly happy people get together. Amazing shit happens. When a happy person and an unhappy person get together, it doesn't work. It can't work. There is no harmony but cacophany.



In terms of personal matters, you get into the conflict of ambitions vs. resources. This is where minimalism comes into play. You only have so much time, money, and energy at your disposal. You can do a lot of things with those resources, but you can't do everything. When you want two or more things but can only have one, this creates stress and frustration. This is why our current wealth of information has created the problem of deciding what to read because in less than ten minutes, the internet produces more information than we could read in ten lifetimes. The same thing is true in terms of material resources. We can now buy more things than we actually have time to use.



This is why I spend so much time on the issues of relationships and minimalism here at the C-blog. This is because these are my problems that I am trying to solve. But as you can see, I already have some answers on those. But when it comes to happiness, I have that figured out. I live in a blur, and I have to take breaks in order for my brain to catch up with it all. I live in a constant state of flow.

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