Okay, so we are here to discuss happiness and happiness is a word.
So it’s very good to look at the etymology of happiness. Where did this word come from?
Happiness is an English word and it comes from much earlier, much older words, which signified luck, chance, luck.
So if you were happy 500, 600 years ago, it meant that you were lucky.
Another meaning of happy about 600, 700 years ago, it was equal. So luck, equality, prosperity, having a lot of money, a lot of property, these were the meanings of the word happy a few hundred years ago.
The Scottish also will also use the word happy to describe someone blessed by God, chosen by God.
The Puritan Protestants, when they established the United States of America, the colonies that became the United States of America, the Protestants believed that when you are chosen by God, when you are blessed by God, you become a rich man.
Rich people are blessed by God and the Scots use the word happy to describe such people.
So as you see, the original meaning of the word happy had a lot to do with money.
Having money, having property, being rich, this is what people then considered happy.
The only exception were the Welsh, people from Wales. People from Wales use the word happy to describe someone who is wise.
And I much prefer this interpretation of the word happy because I think happiness requires wisdom.
If you are not a wise person, you are very, very unlikely to be happy.
There are three components, three ingredients in happiness and all of them require some wisdom.
The first component is that you have managed your life or you manage your life well.
You are self efficacious. In other words, you are able to obtain outcomes and results which are good for you, beneficial for you and for those you love.
And you are self actualized. You have realized your potential.
So the first element in happiness is that is good management of life, good management or realization of potential.
Making yourself and everyone around you accomplish goals which make them happy in a way.
The second component is that you contribute to something outside yourself.
If you are focused only on yourself, if you are only the first ingredient that you are managing your life well and that’s not enough, you need to be connected to something bigger than you, something outside yourself.
This something outside yourself could be imaginary. For example, God.
God is an imaginary being. So you could be connected to God.
It could be real. It could be a nation. It could be a community. It could be a football club. It could be a voluntary volunteer organization.
As long as you’re connected to something outside you bigger than you, you contribute to the collective, you contribute to the community. You have a sense of belonging. A sense that you’re making a difference. You’re a change agent.
That is a condition for happiness.
And the third component, I think, the third component is that you have conducted yourself in life with dignity and with integrity. You had values. You observed these values. You never deviated. You never betrayed yourself. You never betrayed your beliefs and your convictions and your values.
So dignity and integrity are crucial to happiness.
I think these are the three elements having respected and loved yourself, conducted yourself with dignity and integrity, managed your life well, and contributed to your community. These are the components of happiness. I think so.
Happiness is not the same as gratification. Gratification is temporary.
Happiness is much more prolonged.
I would say that gratification is a state of mind while happiness is a state of being.
So you could acquire gratification. It changes your state of mind, but then you need more gratification.
Gratification, in other words, is addictive.
Happiness is not.
It’s a state of being and happiness therefore is internal, not external.
Anything that comes from the outside and makes you happy that’s not happiness. That’s gratification.
So it’s internal and not external.
So grandiosity, hedonism, self-sufficiency, proud self-sufficiency. I don’t need anyone. I don’t care about anyone.
These are all forms of narcissism and people very often confuse these things with happiness.
People confuse possession, owning, owning things. I have a new car. I have a new smartphone. I have a new wife. I have a new girlfriend.
Owning things. People objectify. They convert into objects. Everything, including other people. They use other people. The other people become commodities.
And so anything that comes from the outside and is consumed is not happiness. It’s gratification.
And in our current civilization, capitalism taught us that consumption is happiness.
Not even that it is conditioned for happiness, but that it is happiness.
So if you don’t consume, you’re not happy. If you’re not able to consume, you’re not happy.
Not possible to be happy without consumption.
So and of course, this is a lie propagated by capitalists because they want to increase their profits. They are addicted to growth, constant growth and so on and so forth.
So they need people to consume.
But if people realize that consumption makes them depressed, consumption makes them unhappy.
Consumption is an addiction. Consumption is mentally ill.
If people were to realize this, they would stop consuming or minimize consumption and this would create a gigantic economic crisis and a fall in profits and bottom lines of companies and they cannot afford it.
Of course, media, the media, mass media, social media, these are capitalistic corporations. Even universities are capitalistic corporations.
Most intellectuals are capitalists. They make money out of their public intellectual position. It’s all about money so you can trust no one.
You can trust no one with your happiness. You should not look for a guide or a guru or mentor and so on so forth because they are contaminated and corrupted by money.
The only locus of happiness is inside you and you have all the information you need more or less from the moment you’re born. All the information you need in order to be happy.
You just need to learn how to read yourself and then how to respect what you learn about yourself, how to respect yourself.
Our civilization is a civilization of self disrespect, self trashing and so when you don’t respect yourself and you’re an addict, you’re a junkie of consumption.
Now, of course, you cannot be happy.
Now, happiness is individual. I am happy in one way, you’re happy in another way.
This is why we can never define happiness. Never.
And we can never define love.
Because I love one way, you love another way. That’s why there’s no definition of love that is accepted, not even in psychology.
These are idiosyncratic individual, individual outcomes.
So we cannot capture them in a lexical definition.
Each person is happy in his own way, but an unhappiness is universal.
So we both are happy in different ways, but we are unhappy in the same way.
Unhappiness is universal.
So if we want to study happiness, we should not study the existence of happiness, but we should study the absence of happiness.
Because it is the absence of happiness that is universal.
The existence of happiness depends on you, on me, on her, on everything. It’s individual.
We cannot study anything. I cannot learn anything from you about happiness.
Nothing. We can talk nine hours now and I will still learn nothing from you about happiness.
I can learn a lot about your happiness, but it has nothing to do with my happiness.
However, if I learn what makes you unhappy, I can learn a lot about happiness.
Because it is the absence of happiness that defines happiness. It’s like negative. A negative becomes a beautiful photograph.
I created a therapeutic tool, a tool in therapy, that I called it the map of happiness.
The map of happiness has two components.
I ask when I teach you the map of happiness, I ask you, what is the thing without which you can never be happy?
So I’m not asking you what makes you happy.
That’s not the question. I’m asking you, what is the thing without which, if this thing is not in your life, you can never be happy?
So, for example, wine. I like wine. Wine makes me happy, but I can definitely be happy without wine.
So this is the wrong question. What makes me happy is the wrong question.
But I can tell you that if I didn’t have access to books, I would never be happy.
So the question is, what in my life is something without which I can never be happy?
And the answer is my case, is books.
Each person, some person will answer sex, some person will answer food.
My answer is books. Many things make me happy. Very few things are preconditioned for my happiness. Very few things, without them, I can never be happy.
But many, many things make me happy.
So we should focus on the few things without which you cannot be happy.
And the second question in my map of happiness, when I ask the people, yes, I’m asking, when you are not happy, how do you feel? How does the absence of happiness feel to you?
And you will be surprised that people never think about this. They think how they want to be happy. They think how they want to be happy.
Say, I want to have money. I want to travel a lot. I want to have a beautiful girl. I want to have a car. But they don’t sit around and say, OK, let me now get acquainted. Let me get familiar.
With my condition of unhappiness. Let me think deep about the situation when I’m not happy.
Very few people are doing this. They can say to you, I’m not happy right now, but they don’t analyze. They don’t really study. To understand happiness, you need to study the absence of happiness. Unhappiness is a much more extreme condition.
Unhappiness is really distress, depression, anxiety. Unhappiness is an active state.
I’m not talking about unhappiness. I’m talking about absence of happiness, what the existentialist called nwe. Absence of happiness, when life is dull, is not exciting, is not not worth living. You can’t get up out of bed, not because you’re depressed, but because life has nothing much to offer you, like a very long and boring film. You know, so this is a condition of absence of happiness. We feel very good when we are happy, because that’s an active state. And we feel very strong. And actually, we feel very good when we are unhappy. Because when we are challenged, when we have to overcome something, when we have to fight in order to accomplish things, we feel good.
Happiness and unhappiness, these two active states, make you feel good, not bad. It is the absence of happiness, which is essentially the absence of life, that makes you feel bad.
Depression is not about anything objective. You can find multi-billionaires who are depressed. It’s not about some, it’s not about an objective thing. Depression is the hopelessness, is hopelessness. It’s the belief that nothing good or exciting is ever going to happen to you again.
So it’s not unhappiness. If you, if you have to work hard, because you lost all your money, and you have to work hard to make money, that is a challenge that that energizes you, gives you energy.
So that’s unhappiness, but it gives you energy. Happiness and unhappiness energize.
Absence of happiness takes away your energy, depletes you, depresses you.
And essentially, it’s a form of death, absence of happiness. Only in death there is absence of happiness.
That’s in a nutshell, a few observations about happiness and related issues.
Somehow you’ve answered a lot of questions from my list in brief or in detail.
So I will jump to the question number three.
I missed some questions. This is horrible. No, no, it’s great. I was thinking, what is a good and healthy ratio between happiness and unhappiness?
I think most of our lives, we should be unhappy. I think the healthy state is for most of our lives, we should be unhappy.
Happiness leads to conservatism. When you’re happy, you want to freeze. You want to freeze. You don’t want to change anything. You don’t want to transform anything. You don’t want to experiment. You don’t want to explore. You don’t want to discover. You don’t want to move, because if you move, maybe it’s illusion, maybe it will disappear like smoke, and you don’t want this. You freeze.
We have another condition where we freeze. Trauma. In trauma, we freeze. When you’re confronted with a traumatic state, the danger, extreme danger, you freeze.
Happiness also represents an extreme danger. What is the danger? Losing the happiness.
So when you’re happy, there is a constant fear of loss, abandonment, anxiety, fear that you will lose the happiness.
So it freezes you. You’re afraid to do anything. I think the healthy condition is to be most of the time unhappy and to strive for happiness, to desire happiness, to act in order to obtain happiness, but most of the time to not be happy, because this is the engine, this is the fuel.
That moves humanity. All humanity is working on this fuel. If you, you know, you know what is the ultimate condition, ultimate condition of depression, when all your dreams come true, when all your wishes are fulfilled, I cannot think of any more dangerous situation to the mind.
I think this would, I would become suicidal. If all my wishes came true and all my dreams come true, I would become suicidal.
So happiness is dangerous. It’s a dangerous drug. And in small doses, it’s healing, like every medicine. In small doses, it heals. But in two big doses, you’re poisoned.
So practically, should the pursuit of happiness be one of our daily tasks? Or I don’t know, should it be on our everyday to-do list?
Yes, I think it should be actually the only task. If happiness is defined the way I defined it, you remember the three components, the three ingredients, then this should be our only task.
Everything good, everything good is about failing to accomplish the goal. Only when you fail to accomplish the goal, there is a good outcome.
I will give you an example. Science. Science is investigative. The idea is that science can find the truth, but science never succeeds to find the truth. Science always fails. There is a theory today, tomorrow, we discover that it’s nonsense. And there is a new theory, and a new theory, and a new theory, and like that for hundreds of years. Science is not about success. Science is about failure. And that’s why it’s a good thing. We should pursue happiness in order to fail in this pursuit.
Happiness should remain a goal somewhere out there, and we should always aspire to it.
Similar thing is good, for example, to be good. We cannot really be good people because we are human. None of us can be 100% good. We are sometimes evil, sometimes vicious, sometimes wicked, sometimes not nice, not kind. No one can be 100% good.
But we should aspire to be good. We should aspire, those of us who are religious are not, but those of us who are religious should aspire to God.
Is there any chance whatsoever that you will ever meet God, or if you knew God? No, it’s an aspiration. Everything is an aspiration. Everything good is a process of aspiration. It’s a process, not an event.
So the good dynamic is to aspire, to pursue happiness, realizing that you will never attain it, but you can get closer and closer. Same like God, same like good, same like science, same like everything important in life. You just get closer and closer. Same like love.
That’s nice. I was thinking about different roles. So I was getting to the genetics and I was asking myself, what role do genetics play in determining happiness or unhappiness? And after that, I was going to clusters that are prone to happiness or to unhappiness.