THE COMPLEXITIES OF HAPPINESS

 FINAL BLOG-POST ~ HANNAH LITVJAK ~ H2

    For some, happiness is a fleeting emotion; it comes and goes like a brisk breeze, never quite lingering for never quite enough time. For others, it is merely absent. But, as it seems, for the rare few, happiness is there whenever they seem to need it. How can we, as individuals, desire something that upscales an emotion but is unsteady like an emotion? Why does happiness never last? How can we acquire happiness at a more frequent rate? Can we even acquire happiness, at all?

    Happiness is not simply a universal thought, ideal or feeling; it can be dissected just like any other emotion. To conquer an issue with understanding something, you must look into which part of that something that is either not clicking or resonating with you. Happiness can be, for the sake of simplicity, thus dissected into sections of hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Hedonism, in its most generalized terms, is prioritizing pleasure in life; doing what makes you happy or simply believing that pleasure and satisfaction are the key aspects of life and avoiding pain or self-reflection if it forsakes pleasure. Life satisfaction theory is where you maintain a positive outlook on the state of your life, wherever and however it changes; patience with yourself is essential. The emotional state theory is about analyzing your psychological state and finding where happiness is lost and found; by improving your psychological state, you can attract and even keep happiness in your life. While the life satisfaction and emotional state theory do fall hand-in-hand, it is not to be familiarized with hedonism, but all three play integral parts into true happiness. (Haybron, Dan. “Happiness.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 28 May 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/happiness/.)

    One could certainly haunt themselves with questions of where one falls and where one has troubles resonating within those three sections of true happiness. Sometimes even asking such questions could repel happiness even farther out of reach; however, after conducting extensive research, I have found a perspective that provides the relieving reassurance that happiness is never working against you. You just have to learn not to work against it. I have also created my own three sections that utilize all three of those previous three sections of hedonism, life satisfaction and emotional state theories: action, actions to take and actions to be precautious of in the pursuit of true happiness. Allow me to elaborate.

    Action is simple; to be you must first do, to be or not to be, if you fail three times try again four times, practice makes perfect - all familiar metaphors we become accustomed to through life. Determination and motivation are the key principles to action. If true happiness is what you are searching for, you must employ sincere determination and motivation in your actions. It can be achieved as easily as writing down things that make you feel or used to make you feel comfortable and/or ‘good’, and then seeing what you can do to gain those things back into your daily routine. Sincerity is significant because taking action for true happiness is not an easy task and requires commitment or else you will fail. Socrates even claimed that eros, that is, the life instinct, desire and sexual love/desire, is not a will to possess the good things in life but rather something that “pushes us towards possessing the good forever” (Hooper, Anthony. “Anthony Hooper, the Memory of Virtue: Achieving Immortality in Plato's Symposium - Philpapers.” Classical Quarterly, 1 Jan. 1970, https://philpapers.org/rec/HOOTMO-6.). In other words, the pursuit of true happiness is taking your greatest effort for action.

    Happiness, thus, can often be found through our actions. Determining which actions to take to achieve happiness requires self-reflection, patience and leisure. The mix of all three is a relieving cocktail that people find successful happiness in because it gives us options - both healthy and unhealthy. But what actions do we take to find true happiness? According to John P Robinson and Steven Martin’s 2008 article “What Do Happy People Do?” published in Social Indicators Research, found the results of their study to be “that happy people engage in activities they rate as more enjoyable in time-diary studies … respondents engaged in significantly more social activities, religious participation and newspaper reading. These differences held after important demographic predictors of activity were controlled.” (Robinson, J.P., Martin, S. What Do Happy People Do?. Soc Indic Res 89, 565–571 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-008-9296-6). Human interaction plays a major role in our happiness, so often actions to take are actions that involve people. Someone who can reply, give feedback, have your brain work, entice your being just enough to provoke a pleasant after-feeling that eventually builds to lasting happiness. So, while your actions to find lasting, true happiness is self-inflicted, it is not through yourself to succeed. "Aristotle defined the supreme good (tagathon kai to ariston) as “an end of action which is desired for its own sake, while everything else is desired for the sake of it” (E.N. 1094al9). Prima facie, one can interpret the contention that there is a supreme good in three ways. One may take it as a logical truth, as an empirical observation, or as a moral imperative. Someone who says that there is a supreme good, in Aristotle's sense, may mean that as a matter of logical truth there is a single end which is aimed at in every choice of a human being. He may mean, on the other hand, that every man does as a matter of contingent fact have a single aim in every one of his choices.” (Kenny, Anthony. “Happiness.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/4544724?casa_token=oSwnR2V8_mwAAAAA%3A5YHRGuuEp19RnKpJInQ1ZqIleUH3NV4wj9KxCXoRVVwJuUJCpSNJBUWQ-8943e1fCmD300rUIMRStXFAR0zitg3mTzDSO6bLoPvo4fxWINP8lSVNOSE&Seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents, 1966.)

    There is a controversial statement by Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, who claimed that “the moral worth of all action should be judged by the degree to which it contributes to the ‘greater happiness of a greater number’” (Veenhoven, R. (2003). Happiness. The Psychologist. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1765/8674 ). What this statement implies is that any action must be only judged based upon if it provided the person their happiness. Let us say you snap on your parent or guardian over them urging you to do your chores while you are busy with finals or you just got home from campus; you yelled at people who care about you to do a house chore/s to provide some relief from your frustration and/or stress, aka a smidge of happiness after a lot of unhappiness. But Bentham requires us to rewire our statement on this by reframing the situation as someone who was protecting their happiness from people who were trying to burden them. Let me also provide a more severe example to demonstrate why the statement is controversial: a fascist dictator utilizes his bioweapons on his own people to protect the future generations of his people in war. We can only judge this as an action for happiness of the greater good, so the innocent lives lost are no longer an ethical judgement in Bentham’s philosophy. What does this mean for people searching for happiness? It means that we should look for happiness with sincerity and ethics. Compromising someone else's happiness does not elevate your own. You cannot lift happiness up a peg. Happiness is a life without struggle with regret; actions that can cause regret in the name of happiness are thus not a work of happiness, so there is nothing for you to gain through such actions. Allow Bentham’s philosophy to be an example of why to be cautious in your journey of happiness; if you can reframe your action to sound as malevolent as the examples I provided, then you cannot gain happiness nor justify happiness in it. Be aware in your pursuit of happiness that a decision made for self-gain does not guarantee any gain at all. Be wary, then, of harming others for your happiness or pursuing unpleasant action to gain happiness.

    It may seem as though it is a congested process, but by following your own version of action, actions to take and actions to be precautious of, true happiness is not a world's away.

DQ ~

(a) What was your highest point in life like? How did it make you feel? Do you feel like you could replicate that feeling?

(b) Do you consider yourself a happy person? Do you find yourself more caught up in the lighter or darker parts of life?