The Pursuit of Hap-pain-ess

Today’s world is a happiness supply-oriented economy

>A 7-year-old does her/his online class on the promise that he gets to play on the iPad. Happiness

>A 16-year-old struggles with parallel GRE/GMAT preparation because she/he wants to live in a western economy and live the promised life. Happiness

>A 25-year-old IT worker does that 18-hour workday to get that promotion so that they can apply for that home loan in their next appraisal cycle. A house of their own. Happiness

>A 30-year-old upper-middle-class salaried professional does side projects to find the satisfaction he/she cannot find in his/her job. Happiness

>A 50-year-old parent pledges her property to conduct her kid's marriage grandly. Happiness.

From the early age of reason, Our parents and the education system implicitly taught us that happiness is the destination. Hard work, hustle, education, money ..etc are the routes. It is worse now. Consumerism and social media are explicitly telling that happiness is not only the destination, but it is a birthright.

We are supposed to be happy and we are supposed to constantly evaluate ourselves “Are we happy?” if not we are then supposed to begin an introspection and read innumerable Twitter threads on how to achieve the life goals that we have missed so far. The absurdity is real (and btw What even is that question “Are you happy?” is that a state? A destination? An adjective? A verb?)

While there is a lot of modern literature on this topic that does superficial plumbing, I sought fundamental questioning on this premise. I found that in the words of Arthur Schopenhauer. A 19th-century German philosopher

To summarize, he quite simply says – “The more you seek happiness, the more miserable you will be. The only probable way of getting any real measure of happiness is to minimize pain, for pain is permanent”

Now, this flies in the face of everything we see around us. We aren’t supposed to acknowledge the pain. Pain is supposed to be overcome, an obstacle to be crossed – like those daily Whatsapp motivational quotes say.

Most of our lives are similar to foot soldiers marching through muddy marshes and deserts with the promise that there will be an oasis once every month or year or decade so. A Vacation. A Car. A phone. A house. A child. Economies and companies are militarized to make use of this need and keep us steady on this pursuit of happiness.

Instead of identifying inner fundamental parameters that contribute to our so-called happiness paradigm, we are in turn outsourcing the “responsibility for happiness” to a thing or person or a location. What do you think happens when Goa becomes boring? Or iPhone doesn’t release its next version? or there isn’t a fancy car to look forward to? But unfortunately, we will never know the answer to these questions as entire economies are perched on these questions.

Let’s talk about the other end of the weighing scale of Schopenhauer’s scale. Pain

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Pain is plenty abundant. We have just learned to be good at avoiding and ignoring it.

“If you try to imagine as nearly as you can what an amount of misery, pain, and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if on the earth as little as on the moon the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state".”

We learn about a lot of stuff in schools. From Amoeba to Accounting and Zoology to Zamindars. we don’t learn a lot about pain, do we?

• The pain of first love

• The pain of seeing somebody die

• The pain of rejection

• The pain of poverty

• The pain of discrimination

• The pain of abuse

• The pain of violence & war

• The pain of rape

• The pain of being misunderstood

• The pain of growing old

• The pain of dying

• Other infinite pains

Our only recipe for dealing with any of these is to focus on “positive things”, Focus on “happiness”, achieve “something”. This is today’s world. Eg. A disadvantaged handicapped poor woman struggles to achieve something, does so, and wins an award for the same - the only response of society, in general, is to “celebrate her”…..Not “Let us discuss what she must have gone through” or “How do we make it easier?” ..etc.

The worry for the upcoming generations is even more alarming because the standard for happiness for a 15-year-old girl growing in Chennai will be “ I want a golden retriever like that IG account and travel like this reels account and have a career like this Linkedin account”

One can hope that we have a more sensitized conversation within ourselves first and with like-minded others about the importance of Prioritizing minimizing pain/suffering over pursuing happiness. Because we will inevitably fail in seeking happiness and more importantly as Arthur says it :

“Pleasure and well-being is negative and suffering positive, the happiness of a given life is not to be measured according to the joys and pleasures it contains but according to the absence of the positive element, the absence of suffering.”

Happiness is like the aurora borealis that you get to witness by being in the right place at the right time by spending the right amount of money for a fleeting amount of time. Pain is the sun beating down on you regardless of whatever you might have witnessed. Buy sunscreen, get an umbrella, do whatever. Planning to go to Norway won’t save you from the sun

I understand that this might come across as negative or nihilistic in a certain sense. That certainly isn’t the intent. If anything, the opposite

By deciding to continue living in this world, we agree to undergo the trials and tribulations that all of us partake in. If that is the case, the only way that we are differentiated from others on this planet is via these three categories :

1. What a person is - that is to say, personality, in the widest sense of the word; under which are included health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education.

2. What a person has - that is, property and possessions of every kind.

3. How a person stands - what a man is in the eyes of his fellowmen, or, more strictly, the light in which they regard him.

Philosophers across the board inevitably agree that any meaningful achievement or self-contentment is a function of the first header while the other two headers have a lot of randomnesses attached to it

However big our bank balances get or however large our Twitter/ Linked in/IG follower count gets, we are not going to be able to sidestep what is coming our way. Larger screens aren’t going to make it clearer, bigger cars aren’t going to make it comfortable, beautiful hotel rooms aren’t going to make it easier. All of them are going to offer the much-needed distractions we seek but the pain we all dread (consciously or subconsciously) will come, one way or the other.

“Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse―until at last the worst of all arrives.”

Do not Pursue happiness, a vapid cloud of impermanence. A glittery haze of purposelessness. Seek the ability to manage pain better. That might directly or indirectly lead you to moments of happiness. That’s not why we do it though, we do it because we are going to suffer far more than we are ever going to be happy.

We do it because during this journey filled with suffering and pain we will see meaning, not absolute meaning, a personal private meaning that will point to a larger purpose if we are lucky enough. Maybe