The endless pursuit of the unattainable (1 out of 2)

The one who knew and still cared was asked once, how would they describe their life?

To which they replied: “I spent the first part of my life trying to understand what I am supposed to do. The second part was about hoping that whatever I was doing is worthwhile, and the last part was being anxious about losing what I have achieved so far, or what else I could or should have done”.

What is our quest on this earth?

What are we pursuing, searching for, seeking?

Happiness? Joy? Pleasures? Or something else?

This text will attempt to address these questions, subjectively with some objectivity.

In most people’s minds, joy and happiness are often confused as one of the same.

In reality, they are quite different, even though they are connected and intertwined ideas.

Happiness and joy have a close cousin, pleasure.

Their relationship with this tricky relative is a complicated one.

Together with pleasure, they form the three musketeers of “good” life.

Is there a fourth musketeer? The hero who supposedly saved the queen.

Pleasure, the tricky relative!

We seek pleasure to satisfy a desire or fulfill a need. Temporary by design, pleasure brings a fleeting dose of joy. When it vanishes, it leaves its memory behind. And thus, the same experience is wanted again, sought after and repeated to satiate the same desire and fill the same need.

If we can sustain a constant state of pleasurable moments, we can bask in a sensation of joy. Very few people can, most cannot. So, when the pleasure stops, the joy quickly disappears, and a sense of emptiness takes its place. This emptiness triggers a craving for more pleasures. When these pleasures are not available or possible, then we enter into a downhill slope of suffering, sadness, deep feeling of ill-being and eventually we

end up in despair.

Not all pleasures have the same destructive power.

Physical pleasures, experienced through our tangible senses, are the worst ally of good life. They will eventually become harmful because of their addictive nature. If good life is founded solely on the feeling of physical pleasures, then it will never be complete, moreover, it is doomed. The absence of pleasure is not just neutral, it is highly detrimental to good life. It destroys it, ruthlessly and thoroughly! We often start by pursuing physical pleasures to feel good, then over time we end up desperately seeking more and more physical pleasures to stop feeling bad.

Mental pleasures, including spiritual ones, stemming from what we cannot touch, smell, taste, see, or hear, are much harder to come by, but they are a better ally of good life. Our thoughts, our feelings, our ideas, and our imagination are fundamentally ours to create and control. They are more resilient to external factors. They emerge from our own cerebral activity. As such they tend to be more dependable and a reliable foundation for a sustainable good life. I will venture with an affirmation, not founded on thorough scientific research, but on my long observation of humans. Thinkers, poets, writers, monks, … who source their pleasures (or something else which we will explore in the section on happiness) from their discoveries, creations, prayers, meditations, … and not from material wealth or experiences, live more fulfilled lives than the richest of people who can fly their private jets, eat the best food and drink the finest wines.

Physical pleasures being ephemeral and mental pleasures scarce for most humans, we look for something else, more lasting, more tangible. We seek joy and pursue happiness, hoping for their concrete manifestation in our lives. Most people start this life-long journey not knowing what joy or happiness are, how they look like, and surely where and how to find them!

Joy, the confused sibling!

Merriam Webster dictionary defined joy as “the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires”.

Theopedia described it as “a state of mind and an orientation of the heart”.

Rick Warren had his own definition: “joy is the settled assurance that God is in control of all the details of my life, the quiet confidence that ultimately everything is going to be alright, and the determined choice to praise God in every situation”.

Jack Wellman told us what joy is not: “joy isn’t like happiness which is based upon happenings or whether things are going well or not. No, joy remains even amidst the suffering. Joy is not happiness.” And what it is: “Joy is an emotion that’s acquired by the anticipation, acquisition or even the expectation of something great or wonderful. It could be described as exhilaration, delight, sheer gladness, and can result from a great success or a very beautiful or wonderful experience”.

Khalil Gibran claimed a strong connection between joy and sorrow, when he said: “your joy is your sorrow unmasked”.

A friend of mine talked about joy in the following words: “joy feels like an intense injection of happiness, infused with excitement and vested hope; an upper, obtainable but momentary”.

Another friend defined joy as “an emotion felt due to an event, a trigger. Earthly or heavenly. It arises from the fulfillment of an immediate or latent expectation. Be it physical, material, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual. Joy makes you smile, laugh, and occasionally cry. For a short or long time. At the opposite end of joy, you will always find its inseparable companion, sorrow. They can never co-exist, but they are never too far away from each other. In a single day, you could experience the highest level of joy and extreme sorrow. The birth of your child in the morning, and the death of a loved one in the evening”.

According to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky: “if an outcome meets or exceeds expectations, then people tend to be joyful. But if an outcome falls short of expectations,

people are sad”. In other words, “Joy is the reward we get when what we receive meets or exceeds what we expect”.

The above definitions seem to cover what joy could be all too well and a bit beyond.

Two things are missing.

The first is the conditions in which joy can be appreciated to its true value.

The second is the earthly ways to find or create joy.

Without these, joy will suffer from inconsistency in interpretation, understanding and acceptance, and scarcity.

These two factors, inconsistency and scarcity, hamper the exchange of joy and its reach.

First, the lack of clarity and the ensuing confusion stand as the first obstacle in the way of exchanging joy more naturally and spreading it more widely. The currency of joy is not the same across humans, and the exchange rates are not well defined, nor understood. Making it difficult to distribute the right kind of joy in the right amounts, to people around us. In contrast, people tend to agree more on what makes them sad. As such they are able to communicate easily their sorrow, confident that the receiver would capture the essence of their feelings based on a common understanding of what it represents.

Second, it is not only a matter of definition - what, when and how, but also a matter of lived experience. Nowadays, in the course of their life, a large majority of people creates or is exposed to more sorrow than joy. As such, they are better equipped to recognize it, and conditioned to identify with it. The same cannot be said about joy. Its scarcity makes it harder for people to know how to create it, find it, or receive it from other people. This stands as the second obstacle in exchanging and spreading joy. What exacerbates further the lack of dissemination is the reluctance of people experiencing joy, to share it with others. When we have a little of something, we tend to keep it for ourselves. The opposite is true about sadness and sorrow, having lots of it, we share it without counting.

Joy is trapped in a downward spiral of confusion and stinginess, whereas sorrow is carried by an upward cycle of clarity and abundance.

Breaking these two trends and creating a new dynamic, where joy and sorrow, are at a minimum, peers and equals, is a fundamental human imperative. It is an essential building block to lift humanity towards a more hopeful future. A future, where the chances to experience joy in one’s life equal or surpass the ones of living in sorrow and sadness.

Before we attempt to describe this new future, let us clear the way by shedding the necessary light on the relationship and differences between joy and happiness. We will then concentrate our thinking on finding the magic formula for the prosperity of joy or whatever is needed to overcome the suffering, the sadness, and the anxiety of living.

Happiness, the inaccessible sister?

What is happiness?

In the simplest of views,

happiness is a state of being where contentment is prevalent.

The degree of happiness is a direct consequence of H, where:

H = (number x intensity of content periods) – (number x intensity of discontent periods), in a given day.

“Ultimate Happiness” is a state where H > 0, every single day.

That is an absolute and unattainable vision. There are days when the bad things of life strike us and no matter how hard we try, we are unable to turn these gloomy days, loaded with sorrow and angst, into content ones.

Fortunately, most people would be satisfied with what I label as “Common Happiness”.

“Common Happiness takes place when H > 0, on most days of the week.

It seems like a reasonable aspiration in anyone’s life, but in reality, very few people live in common happiness. This fact should make us wonder whether the pursuit of happiness ought to be the purpose of our short life!

Finally, If H < 0 on most days, we will find ourselves in a state of unhappiness. This state could be a constant one, when H <0, on every day of the week. A constant state of unhappiness will eventually lead us to very harmful consequences. From despair to ending our own life.

This rudimentary vision tells us that being in happiness is practically an impossible thing. We can be happy for a while, but only for a while. Which, in my view, defeats the entire concept of happiness. It is not a coincidence that most thinkers don’t speak about “happiness” but rather “the pursuit of happiness”.

Constant happiness is unattainable, but its constant pursuit is absolutely within everyone’s reach. The elites have understood this basic truth and built their leaders-followers, planners-doers, masters-slaves, rulers-subjects, … model mostly based on the above axiom.

The second thing we learn from this definition of happiness is that we can experience good (joyful, pleasurable, peaceful) moments without necessarily being happy. Simply because the quantity of these moments is not enough to counterbalance the bad (sad, painful, anxious) ones. Which leads to our discontent and therefore our unhappiness.

To make this view of happiness abundantly clear, here is a rudimentary analogy. if contentment is you and your partner having an orgasm, then “ultimate happiness” would be both having an orgasm every time you make love, and you make love every day. Whereas “common happiness” would be both having orgasms on most love-making days.

Now, you can easily imagine that if both of you have only one orgasm for every hundred times you have sex, then neither of you is happy, sexually and most likely otherwise. But this fact cannot take away the joy or pleasure you feel from any single orgasm you or your partner experience. Actually, the scarcity of orgasms makes them more intense and satisfying. So, being generally unhappy cannot completely eradicate the feeling of genuine joy and pure pleasure when they befall us. Like with the rare orgasm, the pleasure will more intense, and the joy deeper.

Another definition for happiness

We could also look at happiness as a state of well-being where many variables are all aligned in the right way. Arthur C. Brooks in his enlightening article, The Three Equations for a Happy Life, describes what those variables could be:

· Subjective well-being (happiness) = genes + circumstances + habits

· Habits = faith + family + friends + work

· Satisfaction = what you have ÷ what you want

According to these straightforward equations: to be in an ultimate state of happiness, one needs to have, at least, the right genes, circumstances, and habits. These requirements are seldom available altogether. When they do, they don’t stay aligned for a long time. So, very few people, if any at all, could aspire to live in a state of constant happiness.

Let’s imagine, for argument’s sake, that the above requirements could be fulfilled for certain human beings, then you have the third equation, probably the most important. The satisfaction equation. Arthur C. Brooks defines satisfaction as: “what we have ÷ what we want”. At any point in time, we ought to have more than what we want. Or said differently, we ought to want less than what we have. It is an impossible and often undesirable state.

For the very rich, it is not money that they miss, but the other things that money cannot buy. Real friends, unconditionally loving family, genuinely caring partner, absence of fatal illnesses, and few other things of the same sort.

For the very poor, it is food and shelter. When you cannot satiate your hunger or quench your thirst, it is hard to be satisfied. Actually, you are quite the opposite. You are dissatisfied, in every moment. Happiness in its ultimate or common state is far, far away.

For the middle to rich class, the most mentally screwed up class in our current times, its members are constantly missing money to be like the very rich, and they are not immune from the same shortcomings of the very rich, genuine love, heartfelt care, authentic friends, tight family, ….

Let’s note that the most revered spiritual beings never seemed to have what they wanted. They were on a mission to change the world, and for that, what they wanted had to be different from what they had. The same could be said about all inventors, innovators, creators of new ideas, concepts and things. A world where all that we want is always in what we already have is a stagnant world, and for most people, a boring world. Only a few people can fathom being part of such a world. Yet, it seems that the only possible happy world is exactly that stale world, where everyone is constantly satisfied by wanting less than what they have, and also where all the other requirements are simultaneously met.

Sometimes we see the tree and we miss the forest.

Whether we agree with the first vision of happiness or the second, we ought to ask ourselves a question: “Could happiness be an imaginary idea invented by smarter humans to marshal the rest of humanity in the relentless pursuit of an unattainable state of being?” And by doing so, they drive the evolution of humankind, towards a better or worse world, but surely within a world they can control, a world they are creating according to their design and where most of us are energy-burning puppets.

Maybe the above is true, or maybe it is a far-fetched theory. But what is real and fairly evident for anyone willing to gaze, is that the unending pursuit of the idea of happiness has begotten, throughout human history, more despair, misery, affliction, and tragedies, than happiness. This contradictory result, where the pursuit of something, produces its opposite, and in very large quantities, should make us all wonder whether this whole idea of happiness should be ignored, dismissed and its pursuit abandoned and stopped, immediately?

The enlightened ones understood it. For them, it was never about happiness. It has always been about something which transcends the life they were ushered in. They chose not to be satisfied. They chose to create what was missing, for them and for many of us. They lived fulfilled with their creation-power.

But about the rest of us, the less enlightened?

For the common people, maybe it is time we get inspired by those who create, change, innovate. Maybe, it is time we start living our life knowing that it is not about happiness. It never should have been, and it should never be again.

But since we are not enlightened, creators, inventors, and therefore, incapable of seeking a higher purpose beyond the daily life, and since pleasures are either deadly or not enough, and happiness is an illusion, what are we left with to make our life livable?

To be continued ...