The path to happiness

"Our struggles determine our successes. Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly better, slightly upgraded problems.
See: it’s a never-ending upward spiral. And if you think at any point you’re allowed to stop climbing, I’m afraid you’re missing the point. Because the joy is in the climb itself."

Happiness and unhappiness are siblings

"Our problems are recursive and unavoidable. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences."

The happiness recipe

"Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is “solving.” If you’re avoiding your problems or feel like you don’t have any problems, then you’re going to make yourself miserable. If you feel like you have problems that you can’t solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable. The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place."

Opinion, of others

By a peculiar weakness of human nature, people generally think too much about the opinion which others form of them; although the slightest reflection will show that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not in itself essential to happiness. Therefore it is hard to understand why everybody feels so very pleased when he sees that other people have a good opinion of him, or say anything flattering to his vanity. If you stroke a cat, it will purr; and, as inevitably, if you praise a man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his face; and even though the praise is a palpable lie, it will be welcome, if the matter is one on which he prides himself. If only other people will applaud him, a man may console himself for downright misfortune or for the pittance he gets from the two sources of human happiness already discussed: and conversely, it is astonishing how infallibly a man will be annoyed, and in some cases deeply pained, by any wrong done to his feeling of self-importance, whatever be the nature, degree, or circumstances of the injury, or by any depreciation, slight, or disregard.

The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer - The Wisdom of Life by Arthur Schopenhauer

Happiness is happiness

"The poet Alexander Pope devoted about a quarter of his Essay on Man to the topic of happiness, and concluded with this question: “Who thus define it, say they more or less / Than this, that happiness is happiness?"

Consumer Melancholy Syndrome

"The first might be referred to as consumer melancholy syndrome – CMS for short. Though not under that name, it was well articulated by Rousseau, as a result of the identification of happiness with plea- sure. Three unintended consequences of this equivalence cause CMS. First, pleasures only satisfy desires; they do not fulfil them – leaving people sated but sad. Second, people become slaves to these desires and so suffer the unhappiness of that enslavement. Third, this slavish unhappiness is exacerbated, because people find they are not happy even though they think happiness should be their right. ‘Happiness leaves us or we leave it,’ Rousseau despaired."

Happiness is discovered by chance

"Happiness is discovered by chance. But the chance is made by living."

Progress might not promote happiness

"Progress might not promote happiness but can actually undermine it, in three ways. First, progress rests on factors, such as competitiveness, which cause anxiety. Second, it feeds desires, such as acquisitiveness, which cause dissatisfaction. Third, it creates expectations, such as the desire for happiness, which cause disquiet."

Your new car and eternal happiness

"This prediction error works as follows. You are about to buy a new car. It is going to change your life, elevate your status, and make your commute a vacation. It is so quiet that you can hardly tell if the engine is on, so you can listen to Rachmaninoff’s nocturnes on the highway. This new car will bring you to a permanently elevated plateau of contentment . People will think , Hey, he has a great car, every time they see you. Yet you forget that the last time you bought a car, you also had the same expectations. You do not anticipate that the effect of the new car will eventually wane and that you will revert to the initial condition, as you did last time. A few weeks after you drive your new car out of the showroom, it will become dull . If you had expected this, you probably would not have bought it .
You are about to commit a prediction error that you have already made. Yet it would cost so little to introspect!"

The happiness religion

"This new [secular] religion , as happiness has, in certain ways, become as though a faith: with political, corporate and social institutions acting as churches, certain advocates and gurus as ministers, and, vitally, one’s self the god."

At moments in time which start to recede into the past

"The idea that we should seize the day does not tell us what matters in life. We need first to identify that, or else what we seize may be empty or worthless. The wisdom of carpe diem is that time is short, this is the only life we have and we should not squander it. This wisdom is turned to folly if we assume this means that only pleasure counts, and thus spend our days forever grasping at moments in time which start to recede into the past even as we reach for them."

The cult of pleasure

"It’s a message that we need to counter the cult of pleasure which now dominates advertisements and lifestyle magazines. They seem to offer the promise that, if we can fill our lives with enough restaurant meals, mini-breaks, holidays and gourmet dinner parties we will get enough pleasure to have full and satisfied lives. They also promote a kind of hedonistic angst, the fear that there are great pleasures others are enjoying which we are not. To have to answer negatively the question in the title of William Sutcliffe’s satire on backpacking culture, Are You Experienced?, is to admit we haven’t lived.'"

Liking what you do is happiness

“Doing what you like is freedom.

Liking what you do is happiness.”

What carpe diem means

"What this all means is that if we interpret carpe diem as a crude call to party, a belief that the only thing we should live for is now and damn tomorrow, then it is an inadequate maxim to live by. Moments of pleasure are precious because they pass, because we cannot make them last any longer than they do. This may be a cause for regret, but if all that matters is pleasure then all we can do is regret, and life is ultimately no more than a sad tragedy in which we cannot possess the one thing that has real value. This is too pessimistic, not least because it is not the only way to understand what carpe diem means."

‘The systematic elusiveness of “now”’

"The problem with the aesthetic is that although we are in one sense tied to the present, in another sense the ‘now’ always eludes us. One no sooner refers to the ‘now’ than that moment recedes into the past. To bastardize a phrase from Gilbert Ryle, we can call this ‘the systematic elusiveness of “now”’. It is this feature of the present which is the source of the dissatisfaction of the guests at Constantine’s banquet. They are all in their various ways ‘dedicated to or ensnared in immediacy’ but that means all that they live for is constantly slipping into the past. They can never keep hold of anything they value, except in memories, which also fade."

We should continue with the idea that ordinary life can have meaning

"Of course, the fact that these characters are tormented by the failure to meet their own ever-shifting criteria for success does not mean that striving for success cannot be the meaning of life. We have, after all, distinguished between success and happiness. Could not our purpose in life be to succeed, to aspire to do better, even though this makes us unhappy? The problem is not that such an approach makes us unhappy, it is that it is self-defeating. If success is a shifting standard, always being set a little higher than where one currently is, then by definition it can never be achieved. The most we could allow is that a few geniuses have had meaningful lives, since they have achieved unqualified success. To say there can be no meaning of life for anyone but these geniuses seems to be to confuse the meaning of exceptional life with the meaning of ordinary life.We should continue with the idea that ordinary life can have meaning unless we have very strong grounds to suppose it cannot."

Comparison fosters discontent

"These characters all show how the desire for success cannot be fulfilled if we continually compare our own success with that of those who have had a little bit more. Only the most successful can be satisfied by that approach. Chekhov’s characters ring true. As psychologists have observed, our own sense of self-esteem is largely generated by how we compare ourselves to our peers. Yet we tend to compare ourselves to those apparently doing better than we are,discounting those who are less fortunate. That fosters discontent, since no matter how well placed we are in relation to the population as a whole, we only attend to that portion of it in comparison to whom we are losers."

Modern myth of happiness

"Perhaps the greatest obstacle to happiness is the modern myth of happiness itself. If we have an unrealistic expectation of what happiness is we will never feel truly happy, even if we have as much or more than anyone could reasonably hope for. We are in danger of expecting almost as a matter of right those things in life which no one can take for granted. It sounds old-fashioned, and perhaps it is, but we have forgotten how to be thankful for what we’ve got and instead only know how to be resentful about what we haven’t. Our desire for happiness is like a craving that we think can only be satisfied by feeding it more. Yet it is the craving that is the problem."

The happiness ideology

 

“American ideological psyche reveals a number of assumed theoretical and philosophical preconditions, congruent with the identified prominent underlying myths of modernity. Chiefly, that happiness is: a concept or a state to which humankind can aspire; that it is something to be pursued and is both object-like, and elusive, requiring capture; and those seeking it must take self responsible, proactive and decisive steps towards securing it.”

Popularized commodities or comportments of behavior

 

“He describes them as being quite specifically modern, American demands, all of which have been rendered “perfectly explicit, conscious and socially acceptable.” As a consequence of the sheer volume of similarly motivated individuals who crave such states of being, Miller identifies relatively few negative consequences or stigma associated with desiring good health, looks and financial security in mainstream mid-twentieth-century culture. He then asks his reader to imagine collecting a similar catalogue of typical desires from other peoples or at other times: “from Neanderthal men or the Tartar hordes.” Astutely concluding that people often have trouble believing their own peculiar, established longings for popularized commodities or comportments of behavior are socially determined and “learned” rather than “universal and inevitable””