How to Be Happy Without Even Trying: Part I

Don't Hold So Tight To 'Happiness'

        In my last post, I said that seeking only personal happiness as a driving force in our lives didn't work, as least for marriage.  I think it works that way for pretty much everything.  I'm not saying that you should follow the advice of the bumper sticker "Since I gave up hope, I feel much better."  Well, kinda, but not quite.  What I am saying is that trying so hard to have only pleasure in life is like chasing a high on drugs.  You can find it for a minute, but then is slips away, and you never get the same high from those same things again.  Personal happiness is kind of like wet soap; the harder you hold onto it, the faster is slips out of your fingers.

What in the Name Of Materialism Do You Mean?

Nice place to visit... But do you want to live here?

        Here's an example.  I think most of us picture our ideal retirement as something like the picture on the left there.  You know, pina coladas in a hammock by the sea, watching the sun set; no worries, no lingering obligations.  Just taking it easy.

        That's the problem.  We think this will make us happy because we think that hard work, responsibilities and difficulties are things we don't like.  What if all you did every day was exactly what you felt like doing?  Just relax.  You want food?  You can pay somebody to fix it for you.  Don't feel like cleaning?  That's okay, the maid will do it for you.

        In reality, most of us would hate living that way for long.  We get depressed.  We get anxious.  Think of those days that you sleep late, do nothing, talk to nobody, and realize right before bed that you are still in your pajamas, never showered, and your house is dirty because you haven't cleaned up after yourself.  If you are anything like me, you feel filthy, bloated, smelly, and stagnant.  Imagine that, year-round.  Even if we shower, clean up, etc, if we actually spend all our time seeking pleasure, we feel that our life has no meaning.

Examples, please?

See how they are living the
American dream?

        Think of any person you know who 'has it all.'  Are they happy?  Good heavens, man! Are you daft? Have you ever been to Walmart?  There are whole magazines dedicated to chronicling the unhappiness of their lives!  How many times have you heard about celebrity suicides, attempted suicides, breakdowns, break-ups, or any other bad news?  Okay, sure, there are tons of factors.  Artists tend to be less emotionally stable, lots of other things you could mention, but if money and luxury were all that we needed to make us happy, wouldn't you expect money to fix a few things for these people?


        Dave Ramsey is a self-made millionaire who found out about money and happiness the hard way.  He went bankrupt.  He now tells people all he can about wealth; how to get it, and what it doesnot do.  To paraphrase him, 'Money doesn't make you happy; it makes you more of what you are.'  So he says that if you are a happy poor person, you will be a happy rich one.  If you are an unsatisfied poor person, you will be an unsatisfied rich one.

        Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter and Square Up credit card readers,) makes this point particularly clear.  In a podcast of a business lecture series at Stanford, he talks about how he was newly a millionaire, sailing around the world in his private yacht, and discovered that he was disgusted with his life as it was.  So he came home and founded another company.  He talked about how hard it is to found a business, no matter how much money you have, but how surprisingly that was what he wanted.

In Your Face, Freud!

        Viktor Frankl, a psychologist/neuroscientist who wrote one of my favorite books ever, "Man's Search for Meaning," was a Holocaust survivor.  He wrote about his experiences, and what he learned about human nature while he was
there.  In particular, he explained how cigarettes were craved by all the inmates, as most were addicted to tobacco, and so they were used as currency, to be saved and spent carefully.  Nicotine eases anxiety.  Frankl said that you could tell when a man had given up on life when he began to smoke his cigarettes.  Now pay careful attention to what I just said.  He claims that when a man began to actively try to escape the stress and pain of the camp, seeking the pleasure and relief of anxiety provided by his cigarettes, it was when he had lost the will to live.  We survive if we have fight, if we are not afraid to accept pain, and if pleasure is not our driving force.  (*cough*In your face, Freud!*cough*)

        Now, Freud and Darwin tell us that seeking pleasure is what keeps us alive.  What does Frankl find keeps us alive?  He put it this way; "Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how.'"  He says the ones to live were those with a meaning greater than themselves to live for.  A son, a wife, or in Frankl's case, a life's work in the field of human mental health to publish.  Those were the ones that lived.  Not the ones that sought only for their own comfort and to avoid their own pain.  Darwin calls for survival of the fittest, and apparently the fittest think in a bigger picture than the one they see in their mirror.

If this is your reason to live, your odds of surviving Auschwitz just dropped.

        In short, we don't seek 'happiness' as we usually use the term.  We don't need to have pleasure in order to survive.  We don't need ease or comfort.  We need a meaningful life.  We are survivalist philosophers.  We seek meaning in order to live.

So What is a 'Meaning' to Live For?

        That is an excellent question.  Going back to Frankl, "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked."  I think that this is a discovery that takes a lifetime.  I think that Maslow had some ideas, about becoming our best self, fulfilling our potential, or as he called it 'self-actualization,' but I think that his concepts are a little too inward-focused.  

        I'm sure my answer as to what makes a life meaningful will never be complete until my life is over, so in the meantime I'll just a list few key points that I've found so far:

• Challenges:  In every movie, every book, every captivating work of fiction, there is a problem.  There is conflict.  Without that, why would we care?  We are intrigued by it.  When we have leisure time (when we aren't busy facing our own conflicts,) we entertain ourselves by reading of conflict elsewhere.  The more dire the circumstance, the more exciting the story.  I think it is the same in our own lives.  If we aren't challenged; if everything is easy, we feel that there is a lot of meaning missing in our lives.
• Progress: I think this is what challenges give us; growth.  The excitement of a child at learning to walk, or a chemistry student learning to make his mixture change color, or even the bodybuilder breaking his previous record.  We want to be more today than we were yesterday. 
• Connection to other people:  This is so many-fold that you will have to imagine most of it.  Sometimes this is family and loved ones.  Sometimes, like in Frankl's case with his research, it is all mankind.  In whatever way, we feel worthwhile when we are sacrificing anything (time, effort, money, even just thoughts,) to others.  In the concentration camps, it was easier for people to forget their own hunger when working hard to satisfy the hunger of others.  This is why my contradictory advice to many unhappy people is, "forget about trying to fix your own problems; go help somebody else fix theirs."  It's amazing how well it works.  

        Most of the songs, stories and poems we find especially beautiful, touching, or meaningful fit in these categories.  The movie "Life is Beautiful" which is a story full of funny and joy, but also very full of sorrow and strife.  Or the poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley.  

        So really, my opinion is that you don't care nearly as much as you think you do about living a life that is carefree and free from want.  I think you care far more about living life so as to feel that you are a worthwhile human being that makes the world a better place.  And the best way to do that is to forget about you.  

        Ultimately, I believe that a life is best lived when it is given to others.  So how do you be happy?  Stop trying to look for it so hard for yourself, and you'll be surprised to find the nobility in minor day-to-day struggles and sacrifices for others.  Don't keep score, imagine that you have an infinite obligation to the people around you, and you'll stop caring as much what you have or don't have, what goes wrong in your life.  Get out of your head and over yourself.  There are over 6,000,000,000 other people on the planet.  Go make a difference to more than just the one that is reading this blog.

and What is the Comparison to Drugs?

Yeah, that is comparison to drugs is completely literal.  (Well blast me to next birthday, I'll have to finish this tomorrow... My brain goes to bed at the same time no matter when my body does.)