The Paradox of Happiness

It is an axiom of our culture, and indeed enshrined in our founding documents, that a primary goal of life is the pursuit of happiness.  But what is happiness?  How do we measure it?  Do we ever really achieve happiness in any long-term sense, or does it cleverly elude us in the very moment that we seem to have attained it?

Each person may define happiness differently.  For most it seems to involve comfort and physical well-being, as well as some sort of fulfillment in terms of work and activities.  For many, having a good family life seems to be an important component of happiness. 

We generally assume that peace and prosperity are fundamental to happiness and that conflict and deprivation are to be avoided.  We dream of a world where harmony prevails, and people can find a permanent sense of happiness.  We imagine heaven to be such a place, and humans have for eons attempted to ease their earthly suffering with dreams of an afterlife where they will be truly happy.

But are human beings ever continuously happy?  Doesn’t the very first moment of an achieved happiness already have in it the seed of an unsettling disquiet, a desire for something different, a new experience?

One need only regard the lives of the very wealthy, who by all normal measures should lead very happy and fulfilled lives.  Yet they seem mainly to be mired in all forms of unpleasantness and plagued with heavy doses of unhappiness!

Or I think of the idyllic American small-town environment, portrayed as a utopia of friends and neighbors, fulfilling work, a safe and calm environment.  Yet how many stories depict the restless young man or woman, suffering miserably under the suffocating blanket of all this supposed happiness, who yearns to break free and experience changes, challenges and new frontiers.  The American small town has in recent years decayed into a nightmare of opioid addiction, joblessness and reactionary politics – hardly a utopia anymore!  But perhaps it never was.

Does happiness require bouts of unhappiness to define it?  Are the vicissitudes of life necessary if we are to have any real satisfaction?  In moments of despair or despondency we may long for calm and stasis, but as soon as it arrives we are bored and restless once again.

The cycle and co-dependency of happiness and un-happiness is never more vividly depicted than in the case of drug addiction.  The addict is perfectly happy the moment he or she shoots up, but the high rapidly ebbs, leaving in its wake a horrifically devilish need for a new fix.  And the irony is not lost that the most potent addictive drugs are those that conquer pain as well as provide euphoria.  Addiction is the perfect metaphor for our joy/sorrow dialectic, played out at its extreme edge.

The Buddhists seek to evade this mercurial roller coaster ride of pain and pleasure, joy and misery.  This dukkha, a craving which can never truly be satisfied, seems an apt description of our lives.  In my simple assessment of Buddhism, I discern an attempt to get beyond this craving and achieve some sort of blissful state of transcendence, much as mystics in other religions seek to focus on the divine and leave the worldly pain and temptation behind.  But is it really practical or desirable to eliminate this craving?  Isn’t life by its very nature a dynamic, ever-changing process?  Will any enduring transcendence just end up as a numbing of our sensibilities, a true opiate of the masses?

I don’t see any panacea for life or happiness.  It is a battle that we all must confront in good faith, doing our best to exult in the highs and courageously endure the lows.  There may be ways to flatten out the curve, but it is not clear that this will make life any more palatable.