What is happiness? Let's first see what it is not. Is it perfect security? The state of knowing for sure that no one can harm you in any way. No. Because you might be bored out of your wits living with nothing but a guarantee for your safety. We need something with which to fight the tedium. We do some soul searching and if lucky enough we find some hobby or vocation lurking within us that is going to provide us with something to live for, to enjoy, to help pass the time. If we devote too little time we lose interest and if we devote too much we neglect other things and become so obsessed as to disregard all else besides. We find it impossible to do the things that we most want to do because there are obstacles in the way such as work, family, children, parents, relatives, friends, dependents and so on. And if our hobby is an expensive one, money is usually the first hurdle to negotiate. The idea then comes flooding into our heads. If we had plenty of money, we could pay others to do the things we don't want to do which would leave us free to do what we want to do. Marvellous. All obstacles lifted in one fell swoop. We now give ourselves sufficient wealth to have anything we want pretty much instantaneously. Having done and acquired a great many things in our battle to fight the boredom, we might one day decide to try some narcotics. This leads us to addiction and possibly death. It might be fast cars or super bikes that kindles your fire in which case you now run the risk of wrapping your vehicle and yourself around a misplaced tree as you endeavour to overtake any one that happens to be in your way. By the same token you might start eating too much or drinking to excess simply because it is available at no cost or effort. Wealth opens the door to excesses that are otherwise unavailable to you. But none of us will ever admit that we can fall into any of these things before the acquisition of wealth. We are always wiser than those rich people who have more money than sense! Hmm. There are countless wealthy people who are unhappy and they are the first ones to admit it but strangely though every one of them prefers to be rich and unhappy, than joyful and broke. We now construct a set of principles and rules that best suits us and ensure we stick to them rigidly. As time goes on, once or twice those particular vulnerabilities and weaknesses get the better of us and slowly but surely we start to forget some of those rules and promises we made. Eventually we give up altogether and say: to hell with it all, let's party. So now we are near the end of our life having tasted some, if not all, of the above. Did even one fleeting moment of happiness pass during those decades of wasted opportunities as we grappled with futility, failure and fatigue? "YES," you cry out. Of course it did. But alas it wasn't happiness. "What was it then?" Pleasure, which is nothing more than a poor imitation because we've never actually encountered true happiness. Sorry to disappoint, but those who tell you they are happy are almost certainly lying and the sad thing is that they don't even realise it. What is happiness?
For us mortals, it can only be achieved if we ensure that the joy of being alive increases with the adversities we have to face. |
