Happiness

Happiness is a purely human state.  People may try to project it onto various animals and pets, but our experience of happiness is unique to our consciousness.  Surprisingly, we find there is no easy way to define it nor pin it down in words, although we can describe it endlessly.  There are no simple scientific methods to produce it, to measure it on some kind of scale, nor to experiment with what causes it.  It can come and go without warning in an instant, without seemingly any external circumstances changing at all, as can many of our emotions and moods.  Yet any child, any sane person, wants to be happy.

That makes happiness a mysterious phenomenon for our rational and logical culture.  Such ineffables are considered somehow dangerous and suspect, as if they are not real in the universe.  How can we find a handle on something that has indefinable extremes, and  no possible placement in “normal.”  What would normal happiness constitute?  And even at extremes, when most happy there are tiny fragments of being unhappy, as at most unhappy, there are always echoes of happiness.

And the various conditions that cause happiness vary tremendously, yet the experience seems to be constant and fixed.  Different people get happy at different times, from different things, yet they all claim that happiness is much alike.  It is an absolute condition, in a way, yet always relative to what might make us happier.  We invoke our multiple selves so that at any given moment we might be happy when looking at things one way, unhappy if thinking about them another.

Being happy is more our instinctual driver than what we think might bring it _ wealth or power or sex or freedom.  Pursuing happiness is enshrined in our cultural matrix, yet it achieving it _ wallowing in it _ is something to be feared and avoided.  Happy people are content and presumably do not want changes _ but change is progress.  Happy people are bad for progress, but we are told that in the future we will be happier if progress now is achieved, presumably through our current unhappiness.

And that causes manipulation by our leaders and condemnation by our preachers.  “You may think you are happy but …”:  your future will be bleak, god will punish you for eternity, you are wasting your life, you must try to accomplish more …  People or groups that are happy and content are variously lazy or stupid.  The grasshopper dies in winter, while the ant survives. Happy artists are failed artists.   Content individuals do not have the fire in the belly for entrepreneurial innovation.  But, just maybe, trading today’s happiness for various cosmic illusions of greater happiness to come is a bad thing, especially when pushed to extremes.   Consider that, when the sun is bright and the green world beckons, but you are forced once again to stare at your screens and limit your being to logical clouds of words.

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I’ve always managed to be reasonably happy, regardless of circumstance, and that has undoubtedly limited my worldly success.  Part of my happiness, of course, was realizing about how much worldly success I minimally required to live the life I wanted.  One of the fascinating things about human motivations, accomplishments, and evaluations is how intensely circular and self-referent they can become.

Should a happy person be an optimist, or a pessimist?  You can make a case for either, although I tend to fall into another group, which you could call the “que sera, sera” philosophy.  Those who expect things to get better are often relatively unhappy now and remain unhappy if their future hopes do not come true.  Those who expect things to deteriorate often consider themselves happier now than they will be, and are sometimes pleasantly surprised at how problems work out, but they always wander around with clouds of doom over their heads hiding the sunshine of existence.

The real trick to happiness for me has been _ well, not moderation, but perspective.  It’s pretty asinine to claim you should try to be moderately happy, as it would  be to seek to attain moderate health, or moderate love, or moderate experience.  You want to be as happy as you can be, but not to the extent of damaging other areas of your life _ for a given happiness, like all our desires, is dependent on who we are and what we are thinking at the moment, and is always in conflict with other desires and happiness we should be aware of:  spending money  now, for example, instead of saving it for something we want.

Happiness is balance, but not moderation, not a middle path but a choreography that can be magnificent.  From my own prejudiced judgment and  perspective, living as happily as possible is one of the grandest achievements of any conscious being, and should be considered, most of the time, above all else.  Not least important, finding some kind of happiness somehow is almost always possible for most of us in most situations.

My paths to happiness have varied over time.  Generally, however, I have found that taking the time to exist in the moment, to float in the entirety of who I am, and meditating have been useful.  A deep breath when rushed,  a forced minute or so to consider a sunset or a flower, a lazy acceptance of just feeling tired and content, or even just a forced smile while things are going badly can make my day more enjoyable, which is a dandy start for the rest of my life.

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Happy thoughts, happy world, happy little trees.

Happy life, happy times, happy you and me

Giggle, giggle, laugh and smile,

Be joyous all the time

While others struggle, make you toil,

Earn money, chain your mind.

What goals suffice a human life?

Monuments or plans?

Great wealth, achievement, family?

Well _ take them if you can.

But each sad moment has a price

It’s gone forevermore

If we’re not happy as we live

Eternity’s a chore.

Happy people, happy world, happy earth and seas

Happy life, happy times, happy you and me.

 

 

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What makes you happy?  You can probably name a whole bunch of things without much thinking:  freedom, free time, wealth, health, achievement, and an ongoing infinite list.  Each of them, no doubt, would seem even better if you had more of them.  But if you take that list and really contemplate it, obvious human issues intrude.

For one thing, most of those concepts probably overlap or contradict one another.  Wealth will give you more freedom and free time, perhaps, unless it is achieved with constant work and struggle in which case you have almost no time at all, and your choices are restricted by what you must do.  There are always tradeoffs, like that between wanting to eat to satiety and yet wanting to remain trim.  As you are constantly reminded, “no pain, no gain.”

Another issue of course is that each desire tends to be asymptotic _ that is,  as you get more, each increment is less satisfying.  If you are thirsty, the first sip of water is happiness distilled, but each glass thereafter provides less and less happiness, until you are frankly sick of water and the idea of another drink makes you extremely unhappy.  This underscores yet another problem, which is that all happiness tends to be momentary, recurring and cyclical.  You go to bed stuffed and wake up hungry.

It is wise, but probably impossible, to rationally sort the things that make you happy now or the things that might make you happy in the future and balance them and work logically to achieve what you think you want.  The future is never what you think.  Your deep desires are rarely easily discovered nor pursued.  And a giant fly in the ointment is that you change as you grow older, the world changes every moment, and what made you happy yesterday won’t work today or will be impossible to find tomorrow.

Some say that simply struggling with all these contradictions is what really makes you happy.  Finding a challenge and meeting it will give you satisfaction.  That is certainly fine advice, but it can also ring hollow when after much sacrifice you lose the race and the cheering stops _ and in some very real ways you are born and designed to lose any race except living each moment fully.

The answer is: there is no answer.  You exist with intuition and emotion and imagination as well as with pure rationality and logic and language.   No human has ever become happy by doing nothing but contemplating happiness.  Life is one giant unity, you grab it and run with it, but you need to run with the joy of running as well as for the anticipated joy of what it may provide in the future.

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Cybernetics promises us that there will inevitably be people poured into almost immortal form, kept alive with electronic circuits and billions of transistors mimicking the brain, enhanced unimaginably by extended senses and incorruptible memories.  I think that is all about as likely as any of the other bygone dreams of human immortality, but even in reaching to do so, I think there should be some consideration given to human sanity.  This goes even more for the quest for Artificial Intelligence, which is not even trying to create a human being as such, but some rational agent with logical purpose and drives _ an alien that we should greatly fear.

Human sanity is a strange and infinite unity.  It is certainly not founded on rationality and logic, for there are totally rational and logical people who are by all social definitions insane.  Sanity includes emotions, and drives, and desires _ happiness being one of the strongest.  But it also incorporates feedback on all of those motivations, and a kind of automatic pushback which increases pressure as extremes are reached, making the experience less consuming as it is achieved.  This is a complex mechanism, not really understood by us, even though we depend on it for survival.

Furthermore, human sanity balances contradictions simultaneously as it acts.  A good deed is also in some ways a bad deed.  Happiness inevitably contains elements of unhappiness _ and so strongly that in the blink of an eye our mood can change so that we are suddenly confronted by happiness merely containing seeds of happiness.  For that matter, something entirely irrelevant can intrude from the outside world or our inner being and turn whatever is making us happy or unhappy sideways into some new perspective altogether _ if it is not put aside entirely.  But not forgotten _ always available and a short shimmer away should our attention wander that way again.

That is sanity.  That is hard.  It is not simply logically following instructions.  It is not simply filling out patterns.  It far more than mere response to stimuli.  We cannot really define it, if we truly examine ourselves and others.  We have no means in equations or words to map its fullness, nor approach its utility.  And _ given those handicaps  _ it is impossible that we can grant human sanity to machines or cybernetic enhancements.  Should the core human be lost, the result will not be sane, although it may be powerful indeed.

A human is emotion, existence, memory, complexity, miraculous being.  All of that somehow balanced over the long eons into being able to survive and interact with others, to form social groups, to survive and more than survive.  And to want to survive, to enjoy being happy, to be glad when others are also happy.  Until cyberneticists consider that and figure out ways to implement it in the machines they so mechanistically compose, there is a danger to the rest of us that their results will be exactly what they expect _ and exactly what we should fear most.

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In 2025, the Quantum Happifier app was invented by Arnold Guacamoli.  It was a relatively simple extension of the standard personal cellphone implant, which located and directed a pinpoint induction current into an area of the brain that made someone feel wonderful.  The “quantum” was frankly a marketing ploy, making it sound more sophisticated, but in fact there were 10 preset degrees of happiness rather than a smooth slide of feeling better and better.  Prudently, and on the advice of lawyers, the original model would only provide a moderate buzz even on the high settings.

Naturally, in a troubled world where everyone had an implant, this was a fantastic success and in a small way contributed to social stability.  Soon, however, medical applications became apparent as doctors and hospitals realized that a souped-up version could provide better pain relief than drugs, and that terminally ill patients could quite literally (and inexpensively) die happy.  Furthermore, the cost of ongoing care in all settings was reduced, as complaints fell to zero.  Of course this was fought tooth and nail by the entrenched drug, hospital,  and hospice interests, resulting in a patchwork of laws that solved nothing but did provide much employment for the legal profession.

Media pundits crusaded for and against the device, religions took to the streets  _ after all, faiths founded on the sufferings endured in this world appeared pretty irrelevant.  Meanwhile the masses just went about moderately dazed and stupefied, as they always had, but with a permanent grin.  Money rolled in for Guacamoli, who nevertheless had women problems and just couldn’t seem to get his own life together.

Two developments were to have grave consequences.  Hackers discovered how to easily override the presets and get into the “medical range” of happiness.  Now anyone could be as completely happy as they wanted, which of course meant they needed nothing else, including food, shelter, or life itself.  And unscrupulous governments _ an oxymoron _ decided that by extending the benefits of full happiness to the poorest they could eliminate those most unhappy citizens who were a constant drain on state coffers.  Coupled with the vast problems engulfing the real world,  these caused the population to plummet in a matter of months to unheard of levels. 

Soon, few were left except the fanatics and born misanthropes who had rejected happiness from the beginning.  The way was thus opened for … but that’s another story.  And poor Guacamoli, haunted by what he had done and depressed at who he was, on June 13 2028, set his own happifier on the highest level possible and exited this vale of tears.
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The great truth is that we can only be happy this very instant, and while focused on the very thing we are focused on.  If we shift attention, we may immediately become unhappy from seeing the world in another way.  If we wait to be happy tomorrow, there is no guarantee happiness will come.  If look for happiness in our past, all we have is the strange and vaporous comfort of memories.  Happiness occurs in our always mysterious now.

Whether or not happiness is necessary for survival is questionable _ certainly extremely unhappy people have managed to live long and overcome impossible odds.  Whether it is important to cosmic life and purpose is always unknowable.  Whether it is worth trading  socially recognized success for internal happiness is a constant tension.  None of these questions can be answered definitively.

Yet happiness always does seem good.  We would rather be happy than unhappy.  In one way or another, our triumphs and daily works are somehow involved in letting us generally become happier.  That we cannot completely understand why this should be so is only a reflection on how little we know _ how little we can know and apply _ of our infinite complexity.  We can study cause, and pattern, and brain maps, and emotional chemicals, but happiness like other human characteristics will forever remain an internal and personal reaction.

So at least let us wish each other a happy day, happy times, and a grand hope for a happy future.