On Happiness

Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. --Spider Robinson


A friend who (I think) happens to share my initials (if the 'kb' in 'flameskb' happens to denote her initials) was musing on happiness and whatever it is you have to do to be happy. Being as I have been a tad unhappy myself of late and "you teach what you have to learn", I figured it's about time I put my thoughts to screen on happiness.
(Incidentally, the Internet is a strange and happy-making place, wherein you can count someone a friend without necessarily knowing something so basic about her as her name.)

Well, let's get the obvious out of the way, first: happiness doesn't lie in any material thing. Too many people seem to make that mistake: "if only I had thus-and-such, I'd be happy." Of course, should they ever manage to obtain thus-and-such, they soon find the focus of their material obsession shifting to that-and-t'other. If things made you happy, there wouldn't be so many depressed celebrities--not to mention so many people in the Third World who are--unbelieveably, from our perspective--happy with their lives.

This next is counterintuitive, in this society: nor does happiness come from other people, at least not primarily. Oh, there's no doubt you can pick up echoes of others' joy and elevate your mood...if you're receptive to it. But people who are depressed can actually be driven lower by free-ranging joy. All that love around...and none for me. Those people are happy--they obviously don't understand the situation.
There's this wrongheaded sentiment that floats around, the notion that if you could just find Mr. or Mrs. Right, happiness would inevitably follow. This belief, which pops up in all sorts of guises and can be very persuasive, is akin to treating people as things. "If only I had so-and-so..." Plus, then you're cultivating expectations...really big bruising expectations: "I expect you to make me happy." Anybody ever says that to me, I run as fast as I can in the opposite direction.

On the other hand, and I'll get to this, spreading joy is the fastest way to feel joy yourself. You can't truly experience having something until you give it away...and joy is one of those strange things, like love, that seems to reproduce as fast as--no, faster than--you can throw it around.

So if happiness doesn't come from things and it doesn't come from other people, where in blazes does it come from? The answer is simple, really, there being no other possible source:

From within. From yourself.

Oh, cut the bullshit, Ken. The more I look inside myself, the more unhappy I get.
It's not bullshit. Really, it's not. When you "look inside yourself", are you actually seeing all that stuff you don't have that everyone else seems to? You know, like love, money, peace, stuff? Is that what's making you unhappy?
Umm...
Yes, umm. That's one way to manufacture unhappiness, by the way, and it almost never fails: compare yourself to somebody else. Most people come out with the short end of the stick when they do this. The funniest thing (or the saddest, depending on your point of view) is that I can look at you and feel worthless...and you can look at me and feel just as worthless.
But according to you, everything comes from within. Isn't that too easy?
Well, everything does. And I never said it was easy. I said it was simple. Simple is what becomes of difficult when you don't think about it too much. You think too much about being happy, you won't be. Ever notice that mentally challenged people--"simple" people--tend to be pretty happy most of the time?
So how do you just "be happy", huh? My life's one big central vac, mercilessly sucking. Nobody loves me. I'm totally alone. I'm drowning in shit. You'll forgive me if "don't worry, be happy" sounds a little too...fucking...childish.
Doesn't it, though? There's another group of people who are happy a lot more often than they're not: children. "Being childish" isn't necessarily bad advice.
Well, I'm not a kid. Isn't there anything I can do to be happy?
No.
I knew it.
I mean, no, there's nothing you can do to be happy. You can't do happy. You can only be happy.
We're going around in circles here. "Be" happy....HOW?
Now we're getting somewhere.

Much of my thought here is reflected in Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God series. I highly recommend this set of books, not least because Walsch repeatedly makes the point that you need not believe he's talking to God to get a world of good out of the dialogue. Indeed, his concept of God has no requirement whatsoever that you believe in God. (How refreshing is that?)

Here is an excerpt:

...think of a person who just knows that if only he could have a little more time, a little more money, or a little more love, he'd be truly happy.

He does not get the connection between his "not being very happy" right now and his not having the time, money, or love he wants.

That's right. On the other hand, the person who is "being" happy seems to have time to do everything that's important, all the money that's needed, and enough love to last a lifetime.

He finds he has everything he needs to "be happy"...by "being happy" to begin with!

Exactly. Deciding ahead of time what you choose to be produces that in your experience.

The surest way to be happy, as I have said, is to make someone else happy. By doing that you discover that you were happy all along and just didn't know it: where else did this happiness come from?

The most amazing thing is that you can substitute just about anything for "happy" and the principle holds.

The surest way to be angry is to make someone else angry.
The surest way to experience being rich is to enrich someone else.
The surest way to be loved is to love someone else. (The funny thing here is, the person who ends up loving you may not be the person you set out to love...but somebody will love you. Love attracts love...just as happiness attracts happiness.

Amd that's about all I can think of, at the moment. Oddly enough, I feel better.

*smile*