Happiness
What does it take to be happy? This is a question I like to ask over and over. I certainly don’t know the answer, but I like to try to create mental models of the basic ideas, if only to increase my understanding of the subject and to keep my mind sharp. It’s kind of a weird sport for me. How succinctly can I express what happiness is for me?
I have spent a lot of time Harvard’s McLean hospital and love studying buddhism. There are few things that I have learned that I find useful. The first is that we can’t be happy all the time. Sometimes I hear people talk about Nirvana or that happiness is a choice. These are ideas I have a hard time subscribing too. The Buddha himself was sad on many occasions. If happiness were a choice, then I wish knew how to snap my fingers and be happy. That philosophy seems unfair to people who have real challenges in life.
Happiness seems to be like health itself and I cannot be healthy all the time. Healthy is not about never being sick, but about minimizing illness, increasing my bodies defenses, and to be able to return to health as quickly as possible. Unlike health however, happiness, at least according to Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert seems to increase over time. As odd as it might sound at first, apparently, older people are generally happier than younger ones. It seems a key to happiness might just be to live longer. Daniel Gilbert argues that mortality itself tends to help people put life in perspective.
At least from my experience, especially at McLean, it seems pretty clear that avoiding negative feelings seems to be one of the greatest causes of suffering. That sounds counter intuitive, but there are a few reasons for this. The first is that avoiding negative feelings involves shutting down all feelings. Second, according to CBT, negative feelings increase when they are avoided because they are seen as dangerous. The antidote is to pay attention to them, and like facing other fears in my life, that weakens their power and also instills confidence in facing future problems. Avoiding negative feelings tends to ignore real problems.
This is also very consistent with Buddhist theory which argues that a reason we have negative feelings is that we inaccurately perceive the world. Buddhists argue that we perceive things as bad or dangerous without really questioning it. When we challenge the thoughts that give rise to our negative feelings we often realize they are insubstantial.
