Happiness

I'm delving into this matter because I have claimed in one of my favourite write ups (Cherophobia http://poetry-prose-and-more.blogspot.com/2012/02/cherophobia.html)  that the pursuit of happiness is the only driving factor behind every human action, inaction or reaction. Also it has been a source of major confusion and hence a source of significant power to those who choose to feed off it. Time to demystify it.

Compared to the soul and God, happiness is a tangible thing. Not measurable, but tangible. Tangible because you don't need to believe in it, model your entire life around that belief and wait to die to see if you were right. Tangible because there are people, alive and kicking, young and old, across cultures and geographies who have experienced it, in varying measures. Hopefully that'll make the matter easier to decipher.

Happiness is defined as the state of being happy. Happy is defined as a state characterised by pleasure, contentment or joy. Pleasure is the state of being pleased due to gratification and satisfaction due to recreation amusement, diversion or enjoyment. Contentment is defined as satisfaction. Joy as happiness, elation etc. I guess it's clear that the dictionary will only serve to drive us in circles in this matter. Listing synonyms as meanings and generally being unhelpful. I guess that would be the case if I explored the meaning of any feeling or emotion. You would need to have experienced the particular feeling to understand the dictionary meaning.

I define happiness as what you feel when you get something you want.

It feels stronger or weaker depending on a lot of factor such as how badly you wanted something, your self-perceived degree of entitlement and you level of expectation to name a few. It could be a want in any form, ranging from a food you've been craving to the attention of a person you've been wanting to mastery over an art or a vice or your body to professional recognition or financial success to intoxication in its many forms. You may not even know that you wanted something till getting it makes you happy.

The only common thread here is that the event that brings happiness embodies an elevation from your previous state defined by the coordinates of the degree of presence of a particular factor.

Consider an extended stay at a luxury hotel. Initially the quality of the amenities makes you happy, since it's usually a step up from what you have at home. The positive delta (incremental betterness, for the lack of a better word) is what makes you happy.  Hey who doesn't want a better bed and shower? The the law of diminishing marginal value comes into play and you stop noticing your bed and shower. They're alright, but they don't make you happy anymore. As a certain Mr Kano would say, the delighter has turned into a dissatisfier. Then one day the hotel, feeling indebted to you because of your patronage upgrade you to the presidential suite. The cycle restarts.

It looks like the positive delta is the only thing that keeps the happiness going. Yes, there's this other thing some people like to talk about, called 'inner happiness' which is independent of external stimuli, but it's usually either a scam,  a misnomer or (with a significant probability) something I do not understand. So I'll fit it in as I best can,  and leave it for them to decide which of the descriptions fits it best.

Coming back to the positive delta. If you plot human happiness on a graph it would resemble a non uniform sawtooth wave, with the happiness representing a spike and the following period where we get over the happening representing the decay (logarithmic, not linear). Now the graph represents your happiness, but there are hundreds if not thousands of things that can make one happy. So every time you experience a positive delta on any one of the factors your happiness graph should show a spike.

By extension of the above concept, happiness is dependent on contrast and change. Permanent happiness sounds like a delusional state of mind. No one can realistically keep adding up positive deltas without hitting a patch of decay.

So unless there's a massive overriding reason, which outweighs everything else in your life, and nothing else matters, happiness (and on the other hand, sadness) will be intermittent. It's putting all your eggs in one basket. Maybe you won't live long enough for things to go wrong, but most of us do. And then all hell breaks loose.

So what I recommend is the clinical approach of self induced delusion. (You'll forget that the delusion is self imposed with the passage of time). You can impose control limits on the movement of your happiness, and assume you're happy as long as you're within that band, thus replacing the fine sawtooth curve with a fat line, which must stay afloat at a certain level representing the degree of happiness we have accepted to be realistic.

This state would be defined as contentment - an acceptance of the realistic state of being, without being bothered by it. The key of course is to keep the fat line afloat, because if you're not doing even that much, you're probably dead.