Pursuit of Happiness -1

I was watching this amazing film one day in which the protagonist quotes a famous gentleman and says that happiness is always a pursuit as no matter how much an individual has, he is always in the search for more. This made me recall the words of another philosopher who once proclaimed that the objective of life is happiness itself. Now both these statements seemed similar and yet when looked upon together there seemed to be a vast difference in what both conveyed.

I started to ponder over it and a few questions arose in my mind
a)is happiness an Eldorado that could never be achieved
b)is the objective of life something different than happiness.
c)is there a way to achieve complete happiness (with the pursuit ending)

In this post I will write about the first point – “Is happiness an Eldorado that can be never achieved”

Eldorado is said to be the land of plentiful gold. There are many who believe that Eldorado is just a myth, there are some who believe it existed long time ago. There have been many expeditions till date in search of this place (off course for the gold), but still it remains elusive. The point why I ask whether happiness is an Eldorado is for three reasons, firstly is happiness a myth, secondly in today’s materialistic world have we become so rigid that we have begun to take materialistic success as an indicator of happiness, similar to the explorers who ventured in search for the gold; thirdly whether happiness is something that is designed to be elusive just like Eldorado and we are all likes the explorers who are in search for it.

The much often heard materialistic vs spiritualistic pursuits of humans, scholars all round the world have been arguing the fact that today’s generation is way to much involved in materialistic pursuits rather than the spiritual and this has been a reason for so much discontent and unhappiness today. Is this really true.

Now let us look at the probable scenarios that bring happiness to a person’s life.
To a child probably buying an ice cream, playing with friends, watching some cartoon and vacations or holiday from school may bring in happiness. To an adult, situations like promotion at job, increase in salary, an appreciation at work, weekends, purchasing some valuable assets, spending time with family etc may bring in happiness. It varies from person to person on what brings happiness into his life. Any situation that brings a favorable or desirable outcome to the individual causes happiness. So in order to be happy at all times, it requires that a series of favorable /desirable events keep playing up back to back for an individual.

Now consider two people, one who likes winter and one who hates winter, the onset of the winter brings a favorable outcome to one and unfavorable to another, similarly imagine two people in competition in business, winning a sales contract is favorable for one and unfavourable for the other as he couldn’t get that contract. So all people cannot have a continuous set of favorable incidents. If one expects happiness based on the favorable or desirable events that take place in his life, it shows greed (things should be favorable to me always irrespective of how they are to others). Imagine a negative element like greed causing happiness.

Happiness is nothing but a reaction to a situation. If the reaction to any situation we face is positive irrespective of whether the situation is favorable or not favorable, desirable or not desirable, then one alienates the dependency of happiness on greed.

A positive element cannot and should not be having a dependency on a negative element.
Happiness is no Eldorado and it exists, but the way we try to view it makes a huge difference in our experience, whether we make it dependent on greed or independent of any other things.

In my future posts I shall discuss about the other two questions, is happiness the objective of life or is there something other than happiness that is much more important and whether there is a way to achieve complete happiness.