Two weeks ago, I was contemplating the answer to the fundamental human question -- how to be happy. This was the first installment in a planned series in which I, and the people I interact with, contemplate a philosophical issue. This was, in a way, a deliberate way of painting myself into a corner, of challenging myself. If this "one-week question" was a one-year question, it would still be a challenge, because it is the most essential philosophical question. Ultimately all religions and ideologies seek to answer this. Obviously, I do not have an incontrovertible answer to this query; however, I do have some hopefully helpful pointers.
Most people I asked about this gave negative answers -- that happiness is not having something -- debt, a difficult medical condition, etc.
Based on these answers, it would seem that happiness is the natural condition of humanity, but something prevents this. Since nearly every culture has some kind of structure that is meant to offer happiness -- usually a religion -- it would seem that unhappiness, discomfort with the world, is a natural state, but since this, somehow, does not make sense, most ideologies offer a reason why we aren't content in our environments -- since most people in the west were brought up in a Judeo-Christian-Islamic atmosphere, this is probably, for you, explained by some variant of "The Fall." That we were meant to be happy, that we were, once upon a dream, but aren't because of some mistake we, collectively as a species, made due to our own free choice.
Since the cultural consensus seems to be that we once could have been happy, but aren't anymore intrinsically, it would seem that happiness is the result of an active decision -- of effort, rather than of not doing something. We have to choose to be happy.
I noted in my last piece that often we view happiness as existing only in individual moments. I would argue that this does not mean much, because in whatever moment we exist in right now, we may not be made happy by the fact that we have been happy in the past, for individual moments here and there. These moments may give us consolation and a modicum of meaning, but we can't remember exactly what these moments felt like. Memory is flawed, and it is impossible to duplicate the exact feeling we had in a moment in the past, because, inevitably, we are now a different person with different experiences than the person who felt that happy moment.
I argue that the pursuit of individual happy moments is empty on this basis. One might do something, like theft, that one regrets later despite the fact that it created a happy moment, that creates further unhappiness.
A friend once told me that we all need to "find our groove." I believe she's right. We need to create a whole life for ourselves, independent of specific moments, in which we can be happy. A life where we live in accordance with our beliefs about what is right, and who our true selves are, a life in which we do not sacrifice our values for fleeting moments of pleasure, but a life that is, in its way, a work of art independent of time, in which we live by our values and therefore know, if we ever experience pain, that it was not our fault, because regret and meaninglessness are the deepest of displeasures.
Let me know if you disagree.
