On Happiness
Every person in the world is a sea unto themselves. A one-man show in an ocean of one-man shows, improvising his way through life in parallel with everyone else doing the same. No one can see through another’s eyes or from their perspective, but certain themes remain constant across each of our stories. Happiness is, to most, a goal, the goal to be achieved. The pursuit of that fleeting feeling or state of being is the main conflict that drives the plot of all our existences. All our lives build up to its attainment or our failure to attain it. Of all the actors in our sea of people with all their one-man shows, who can truly claim to do so? Who can look in the mirror and see their reflection looking back at them and say with sincerity that they are satisfied with the way their play has played (or is playing) out. That is, who is happy?
There is a passive component to happiness. One does not choose those times in which they are or aren’t happy. They either are or they aren’t. With this in mind, it seems (at first) that the happiest person is the one who can say that they aren’t unhappy most often. If he exists, this person must be the one who neglects thought in its entirety, for how could he be unhappy without thinking? While his neighbors are worrying about their overdue bills, hating their overbearing boss, and making overwhelming numbers of decisions, he simply pays the bills he can, works as he must, and chooses without contemplation — an unfeeling automaton of flesh and bones. His life is not necessarily easier than others’ lives, but without thinking about it, he can’t possibly be dismayed.
It is important to realize that while our thoughts ultimately decide whether one is unhappy or not, thoughts in themselves are not actually what makes us unhappy in reality. We have pleasant thoughts just as often as we have unpleasant ones. Rather, it is the cause of unhappy thoughts that is to blame. I would argue this to be “stress”. To define stress in some vague terms, we might call it the body's natural response to tension. It once served to push us to our very limits for a short time as we fought for survival. High levels of stress were experienced at very specific moments under very specific pressures: when hunting a wild animal, competing with other tribes for resources, evading predators, etc. The high-pressure situations that required stress were well defined and made up only a handful of the situations encountered daily. That is to say, our stressors were confined to a well-defined box, consisting of only those moments most pivotal to our very survival as a group, but as humanity has shifted from hunting and gathering to agriculture and now industrialization, so too have the bounds of that box.
Those bounds have shifted so much over the millennia, in fact, that we may well call it Pandora’s Box now. Our environment is teeming with formerly unthinkable causes for high levels of stress. High-pressure situations appear in every facet of our lives and every moment of our days. We have to think about doing well in school, finding a job, being there on time, working, paying our bills, eating, caring for our kids, taking care of our health as well as theirs, and saving for retirement, with little room to relax until we’re well into our sixties. These things must be done if we are to succeed in living long, supposedly happy lives in our society, but there are other things too. Everyone has hobbies, long-term goals, favorite sports teams, and current events to keep up with. Our extracurriculars can be just as important to us as our indispensables, and equally as stressful. Our lives are full of, and almost completely driven by, high-pressure situations. And that constant pressure is a direct driver of our unhappiness overall. As the responsibilities pile up, we become less happy. Sometimes this happens even in anticipation of obligations that may or may not come. It appears the very things that are seen as necessary for achieving a satisfying and “happy” existence are contributing to our ultimate dissatisfaction in practice.
This is the ultimate advantage of the unthinking man over the overthinking one. He sidesteps stress in its entirety by refusing to think of those things which he would find stressful. The thinking man has no such ability and is thus required to deal with each of those pressures in his life head-on. Where the former simply glides along, as a leaf does while resting on a river’s surface, the latter faces the current like a rock, being slowly eroded over time. Then, to be happy, must we eliminate stress? It appears so.
But stress is not altogether a bad thing, and being an unthinking person is not altogether a good thing. In short spurts, stress serves to heighten our abilities. It developed and was passed down as a biological response because of its usefulness, not its uselessness. While the overthinking man leaves himself vulnerable to the negative consequences of prolonged levels of high stress, the unthinking man relinquishes the ability to tap into this power entirely. Just as a bird unable to fully spread its wings cannot soar, this passive acceptance of circumstance is not always in the unthinking man’s best interest. It would hold a person back if that were all they were capable of. Besides the limiting factor here, avoiding unhappiness was a false premise to begin with. It is never the true goal of most people when they set out to attain happiness. Rather, they set out to achieve happiness itself, so the elimination of the one state could never have resulted in the other.
Thus, in addition to the passive component of happiness, there is also an active component. It is still true that one cannot be happy at the same time he is unhappy — those familiar with logical principles may recognize this as the Law of Excluded Middle — but simply eliminating unhappiness does not force a state of happiness onto a person. Plato argued that happiness is achieved through flourishing, i.e., through nurturing virtue and through the act of discovering knowledge. The Stoics argued that it is found in the acceptance of what is out of individual control. Nietzsche believed it came through embracing life’s challenges and finding meaning in a world without purpose. Other philosophers have relayed similar sentiments across all of history. In all of these perspectives, it seems there is a component of happiness that is related not to what one experiences, but what one chooses to do. Not to whether one thinks, but what he chooses to think about.
And here is where we can find a reconciliation between our wholly unthinking and overthinking men, for neither of these can be truly happy. The former because he cannot actively pursue happiness, and the latter because he cannot remove himself from his abundance of stress. Between these two men lies a man who thinks only about those things worth thinking about and who stresses only about things that matter. As far as his bills are concerned, he behaves as an unthinking man, accepting and paying what he must without a second thought. As far as his work is concerned, he issues no complaint of the labor or of his organization. But insofar as the things which he deems important are concerned, whether they be art, politics, philosophy, etc, he thinks longly and deeply. He utilizes stress for the tool it is, rather than allowing himself to be controlled by it or cutting it out of his world entirely, and he is the happiest for it.
Of course, happiness is, like many things, in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps you would describe yourself as happy, even as you wade through the waters of life with pressures on every side. Perhaps you already think only about the things you think are worth thinking about, and continue to find yourself unsatisfied. I have discovered, in the course of writing, not what I believe to be a fundamental truth of the universe but rather a fundamental truth of my universe, my one-man show, right now, and I aim to continue my show with respect to that truth insofar as that is what my truth remains to be. I encourage you to do the same for yourself, because happiness is something worth stressing over.
Aside:
To address one of my own criticisms of myself in this matter, the idea that the happiest person is the person who stresses only about important things is vague. I understand this, and the only thing I can offer is that I would expect that the answer to the problem of happiness is vague, because otherwise, the fact that there are so many different opinions on the matter would be puzzling. I would expect happiness means something different to everyone, even varying at different moments of the same person’s life. As much as I would love a simpler solution, I suppose that is just how things are. Another criticism I might have for myself is that I feel like I have spent many hours writing and rewriting, only to come to the same conclusion as Plato when all is said and done. His idea of finding happiness in cultivating virtues and pursuing knowledge of the Good corresponds very closely with what I would describe as my own “things worth thinking about.” Unfortunately, Plato is Plato, and as someone who has read mostly Western philosophy, I am heavily influenced by him. I am by no means attempting to appropriate his ideas. I just say what I believe, and apparently, he and I agree.
5/18/2025