Happiness

Admittedly, I'm in the middle of one of the existential crises I speak so highly of. A good friend once told me that a crisis is inherently bad and in most cases, I would have to agree. But to me, a crisis also means that there is something wrong and whatever is wrong has come to a head and this crisis gives us the unique opportunity to experience the issue from the eye of the storm. Thus, today/this week's/this month's crisis gives us an opportunity to look at many interesting things that for whatever reason are coming to a head.

Happiness is one of the most interesting concepts imaginable. I'm utilitarian in that I believe that pleasure is the highest good man can achieve. It follows then that pain is the worst thing imaginable. Ayn Rand says that life is the greatest value for man, and that anything contrary to the realization of life is bad.

Pleasure takes many forms. Physical, emotional, metaphysical... pleasure is such a broad concept that it can take so many forms. Pleasure is also a funny thing in that, fundamentally, what gives us pleasure hasn't ever really changed. We always find new ways to experience pleasure, but fundamentally, it's always the same. But what will be discussed henceforth is the concept of happiness. To me, happiness is defined as the emotional manifestation of pleasure. Now the reason I say this is because using words like "pleasure" and "happiness" interchangeably can get messy. So regardless of whether you agree with my definition, that's what I mean when I say the word "happiness."

The main interest I have in happiness is the question of its source. Now, think about what makes you happy. For me, it's going out with my friends, performing, laughing, playing an exciting video game, or the perfect song coming up on my iTunes shuffle. Obviously, that's not a complete list--but it's something to work with.

I said going out with my friends makes me happy. Why? indulging in camaraderie and having a shared experience? You and your friends go to the movies and see a comedy. A great joke has been told and the entire theater erupts in laughter. You take a brief moment to look to your left and right. You see your closest friends laughing as well and you sigh deeply and sink a little farther into your chair, content. You walk out of the theater, quote the joke, and relive the experience of having heard a good joke. A few months later the movie will come out on DVD and you'll invite your friends over to watch it. Unfortunately, your friends can't come. They're busy with work or whatever. Not a big deal, you watch it by yourself. The scene with the joke is about to come on and you prepare yourself for the riotous laughter that's sure to ensue. The joke comes and goes. And you? It might have elicited a mild chuckle at best, but suddenly the emotion that follows is melancholy.

A wonderful blog I just stumbled upon is called the Thought Catalog which I highly recommend for those bored at work. Anyways, one of the articles I read defined melancholy as such: ‘Melancholy’ is separate from ‘sadness.' The concept of ‘sadness’ implies grief and a certain hopelessness, while ‘melancholy’ implies a sorrow with purpose, an emotion with which one can be swathed as if it were a shroud. Swathed – no, more like ‘swaddled’, and in that regard melancholy is comfortable, a lozenge to be masticated for a reason, a sadness that has pensive pleasure melted into it, something it’s comfortable to suckle and to be wrapped in... to be swallowed in melancholy is to be immersed in conscious, intentional unhappiness, the sort that, perversely, makes one happier."

Naturally, interpretation is subjective, but essentially, melancholy is not just the state of being debilitatingly sad, it's a comfortable sadness that one occasionally finds oneself in when one is purposively hopeless. Actually, reading that back, it doesn't clarify it all. An example would help... maybe... it's when you try to relive an experience in your head, but the happiness of the memory is so fleeting and seemingly far off that only then do you recognize that it's gone. I think that's why we enjoy reminiscing so much. We sit around with our friends sharing those "remember that time when..." stories because we want to be able to transport ourselves back in to the moment when we were happier than we are now. Sadness is what you feel when you lose a family member or... well I can't think of another example. But you get it. Melancholy is this state of experiencing the absence of happiness from the eye of the storm. It's not a debilitating hopelessness, but it's not a joyous feeling either. Like the quote, it's something to wrap yourself in or a lozenge you chew for a reason.But you also must notice that I can't talk about happiness (or at least haven't thus far) without talking about people. Like cold being the absence of heat or darkness the absence of light, sadness is the absence of happiness. So if you're not doing the things that make you happy, are you sad? Or maybe that's melancholy.

Anyway, so much of what makes us happy seem to come back to our good friend Maslow, a psychologist who I readily subscribe to. Good ol' Abraham Maslow put together this handy little pyramid called the hierarchy of needs which orders our fundamental needs from the physical to the abstract. Of course at the bottom are our physiological needs like food, water, shelter, garbage like that. Next, is our need for safety. Safety contributes mostly to psychological need to know that we don't always have to be at a constant state of stimulation. Safety is 100% key to happiness and having a good time. Give a stranger a gun and your address and tell me how easy it is to relax. Anyway, the next level gets more abstract and even more interesting: friendship, family, and intimacy. We start to realize how tiny our lives are compared to everyone else's (not that our lives are smaller, just about the same relatively small size) (I'll also address death in a later post), and we start to need to associate and cement our existence. I don't know why the need to belong tends to override security. Maybe if you knew the stranger with the gun would bring cookies and your favorite movie, you would even try to make a new friend (see Stockholm syndrome). If this need for belonging is unmet or deficient in some way, it can lead to depression, social anxiety (another thing I'll address), and a general loneliness. But it's funny how occasionally being deficient in belonging can lead to these bouts of melancholy. We clearly rely heavily on the simple presence of others that happiness seems impossible without it, or at the very least unimaginable. I'll come back to this.

Continuing up the hierarchy, we have esteem. Esteem is another funny one because it's one thing to have people around, it's another thing to be accepted and respected by them. Honestly, if I was to critique Maslow, I would lump these elements of people-needing in with the previous level. But what deserves it's own level for sure is the notion that we need to achieve. This is HUGE. Nietzsche among others have written incredibly interesting works on the human need to achieve. Why do we do it? Maslow says that it's for two reasons. For us and for others. I say it's totally for us. On the surface, we care what people think. Performing makes me happy. Making people laugh makes me happy. But deep down, I just want to know I'm good at something. I want to know that my life has a purpose that transcends my frail body. I want to know that my capacity for reason and judgement enables me to do something worthwhile, that will stick out. Many existentialists talk about achievement as a way to secure immortality in a universe where ethereal immortality doesn't exist. Whether or not it does is a different discussion, but the need for money, fame, notoriety, and fans could easily be said to be a facade that says, "Hey world, look at me! I'm important!" But I think that it's also equally true that it's just as much of a way of saying, "Hey self, look at me! I'm important... I'm important... I'm good at something... I'm important."

So these things that make us happy, performing, being well-known in our field, having a ton of friends... is it just a way of dealing with our own mortality? It's possible that it's just a way to stave of the constant looming of that feeling of crippling despair that comes with being insignificant. This leads directly into the last level of the hierarchy... self-actualization. Knowing that you can live up to your greatest potential. Though I think I diverge from Maslow with this one because I think that most of the criteria he has for self-actualization are arbitrary things measured by society like morality, efficacy, rationality... You know, I actually only subscribe to Maslow in theory. I acknowledge the line between each level but I don't think I agree with the conceptual format. Maybe it's more like a square with 4 sections and each bears on the other a little. I don't know. I'll have to work that one out later.

The point is, we need to feel happy. We need it and most of us can't explain why we just feel this overwhelming desire to be happy. We know what makes us happy but I don't think any of us know why. And it's funny how fleeting the things that make us happy truly are, especially when viewed from the lens of when we aren't doing those things. A good friend once tried to tell me that wisdom is being able to point out the moments that are bad and getting through them until the next time when it's not so bad. But it's funny that we're just constantly running away from the bad moments in life and chasing after the good. Why does the good in life have to always be something that we chase? Why can't the good just be something that is?

I posted a status earlier today that might have been a little depressing and if it set off suicide alarms, I apologize. I'm fine, really. The point of the status was just that I don't know anyone who is truly happy all the time, whose life is the way they dreamed, and whose life just constantly delivers happiness at all times. Yeah of course you know happiness by knowing sadness... but again, why does happiness have to be something elusive? Is the state of nature completely devoid of happiness? And what if you were the last person on earth? You wake up tomorrow and no one is around. What does happiness mean when there's no one around to experience it with you? Can you truly be happy and self-actualize if there's no one to have standards by which to measure your achievements?

Listening to my music makes me happy. When my headphones are in, it's just me and the music. [It's funny because when I play my music for others, I always get the itching feeling that no one likes it as much as I do...] But why does that make me happy? Let's look at it in the context that we just explored. How can liking music relate to others....? Well I know other people like music and I know that if certain music is pleasing to me, it must be pleasing to others, right? Not always the case... but it's plausible. Maybe I just appreciate my own capacity to appreciate music, and that makes me think that I would be a good judge of music in a social situation in which that's called for? Who knows.

Think about what makes you happy. Always do that. Never, ever, ever stop doing what makes you happy. If happiness is something we have to chase, lock it in a cage and never let it go, keeping it by you at all times. If happiness lies in something as fleeting as the presence of certain people, keep them around you. If happiness goes away when certain people are around, keep them away from you. If happiness is just a thin tissue cast over what would otherwise be a pit of boiling despair, we might as well enjoy it when it's around. Melancholy will happen when some of that despair leaks onto the tissue, but maybe it's something we should embrace so we can know the true nature of our psyche.

And I'll try to make good on my promises to talk about death and social anxiety. But don't let me do it in the same post, that's not a great idea.

UPDATE 1 6/13: Stupid me... I didn't follow this whole conversation out to the next logical step after the conclusion. What I was really itching to say, and what probably sparked this entire post is that happiness seems to live and die with other people. How do you go from happy to sad? When your friends go home for the night? When you have to go home because you have work in the morning? Obviously everyone else's role in this little void isn't born of malice, but it seems that happiness declines exponentially with consciousness after a good time. Expressed mathematically is something like residual happiness = event happiness - consciousness^x where "residual happiness" is how happy you are after something fun like a sweet party. That's kind of a digression though and really isn't that important.

It is definitely interesting to think of memories as bricks--specific and defined pieces of an overall structure. Memories make up you who you are. They mold our retrospective perspectives on the past. They are the only proof of yesterday and the reason we induce that tomorrow will happen. But they have specific beginnings and endings. Sure, they can be linked together by other less well-defined memories, but the strongest memories have well defined edges and sizes and brightness and construct the largest parts of our overall memory structure. I guess the only difference between memories and actual bricks is that bricks don't really fade away or are as much subject to psychological influence as memories.

Yet another digression... Well, I've already kind of talked about how people can have an active influence on happiness. If they don't love you or express disappointment in you, your happiness is negatively influenced. If someone isn't who you thought they were or you don't have the relationship that you thought you did or could have, there's a significant and profound influence on how you feel. The need for acceptance can cause you to change your entire life, do things you don't like, and engage in poisonous relationships. It's quite interesting. Maybe I'm repeating myself... I just wanted to make sure these observations were on the record and quite clear.

UPDATE 2: Sadness is a full body and mind oppression. You feel it smother you from head to toe and it leaves you helpless and immobile--all you can think about is the pain. Melancholy is a splinter. It will sit under the surface and fester until it starts to hurt. But it doesn't hurt too bad. In fact, you're still able to carry about your day but the pain is still going to be a bother. You can remove it, but it's going to hurt to deal with. It's a tiny pain, but it's pain. It's a quick spasm of pain. But it's pain.

EDIT: Just for clarification, my interest in death and depression is purely academic in my pursuit to understand the human condition. Jeez...