As suggested by Hamishhere and as based on the succinct observation of the wise and wondrous Cecil Adams found in that very thread, I propose for discussion and debate the question:
What is the nature of true happiness?
(Note: The first person to post the Westminster Catechism definition will be treated to his very own Pit thread. If religion enters into the answer, it will be based on the personal values of the participants.)
I would hope for comments from Hamish, Eutychus, the Great Debates regulars, and dare we hope that the Perfect Master himself will grace us with his views? (Probably not: Even Ed Zotti has noticed my existence just once in three years.)
Heh. Polycarp, I thought you were following me around
I’m rushing off to work right now, but my short answer would be that happiness isn’t getting what you want, or fulfilling minute-to-minute desires. I think true happiness comes from a sense of service to the human race as a whole. The chance to help people in need.
Spirituality is a part of it – broadly defined as the ability to see oneself as part of something larger. The ability to connect even to one other person on a profound level is a kind of happiness as well.
Too often, we think of happiness as a selfish thing – I mean, looking at it rationally, that’s how it would seem. But happines isn’t rational. We have a great capacity to be selfish creatures, but it never seems to make us happy.
I’m not suggesting blind selflessness either. Compassion and kindness, basic humanity, joined to courage and strength – ethical thought plus action – is for me the true basis of happiness, or at least of that happiness I’ve found in my life.
This is only an IMHO-style response, but happiness is finding that you do have the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle over which you have long laboured; that when you bite into it, the apple is as crisp and delicious as you had hoped - that sense of ‘perfect fit’; sometimes this is achieved by applying effort and reaching higher than you thought you could; sometimes it just seems to happen by accident and other times it happens as a result of you altering your expectations.
I’ve got a splitting headache right now, so I’ll save a serious reply for when I can think. That said, I seem to remember having experienced true happiness thanks to a pair of warm, dry socks on the morning of day 3 of a 3 day hike (it had started raining half an hour before lunch on day 1 and ended 2 days after the hike did).
CJ
Tries to duck and run, but headache only allows the first part.
I’m echoing what Mangetout was saying to some extent. For me it would be that feeling of satisfaction that comes to you for whatever reasons are personal to yourself. When you are contented, happy, relaxed, just satisfied completely with where you are and what is going on around you. When your morning coffee tastes just as you’ve always imagined coffee should. When your paper is full of articles seemingly written just to interest you and you alone. When your sheets are clean and smooth and give you a good night’s sleep, when you notice the sky and how large and beautiful it is and how small you are, and still as integral a part of the world as it is. When you smile at people on the streets and for once, they smile back. When you know you could die in an instant, and still have existed in a way that has touched other people in a positive way.
I’ve felt it before, that please-let-this-day-never-end feeling. And it does make you find pleasure in the smallest things, everything rich and alive and plain throbbing with vitality. A day to watch the sun setting and feel yourself breathing, just concentrating on that and how good it feels. When there are things in your life you would have change, but are aware that it’s not necessary that they do so. It is peace, and it’s fleeting for me, most of the time. Makes it all the more marvellous when it’s there.
I’m not sure I can say exactly what happiness is, but I can say that I am most happy when I feel no obligation, no fear, and complete security. I do not think that is a description of happiness, but rather conditions which must exist for my happiness. And, of course, only complete happiness. Degrees of negatives can make happiness less than complete, though it needn’t vanish entirely.
I have trouble pinning down happiness itself because so many seemingly different things make me so very happy. In fact, it seem the only thing that links these together is that I am happy.
The emotional response to the experience of situations where actuality exceeds expectations in the most valued criteria. The specifics are personalized in all iterations.
True happiness is totally relative. Happiness, a collection of feelings bringing joy to one, comes to those who choose the middle path and embrace moderation in all things. This could be the answer. I don’t know, but it sure does sound right. Equivocation is everyone’s last ditch effort at looking smart.
Not to disagree with you Tris (this is all pretty much subjective anyway), but for me, it’s when actuality most closely meets (hopeful) expectations; there’d have to be another term for when it surpasses them - I’m not sure I’d use the word ‘happiness’ for that (that’s not to say that it’s negative or anything) YMMV.
Hmm. I see a lot of responses to the OP which seem to suggest happiness is something that just, well, happens. Happiness-as-rain – something that comes and goes, but over which we have no power. Happiness as simply what happens when result exceeds expectation.
This is a little passive for my taste. I believe “satisfaction” would be a better word for this. “Happiness” I reserve for the concept of the “good life,” a concept which has fallen out of favour these days. I described my view of this good life in my post above. “Satisfaction” of our needs and appetites isn’t a bad thing, but we’ve become a society which is expected to live for this hard-to-capture feeling. Advertising is built on selling this as the meaning of life.
I’m more interested in those forms of happiness that cannot be stolen away by circumstance.
I’m interested, erislover, in what “perfect security” is. I don’t believe such a thing exists, at least not in the sense of physical/financial security.
I’m with Hamish, on the importance of connecting individual happiness to a larger notion of the good life. We may experience our happiness, at the chemical level, as individual units, but its conditions of possibility are entirely social–which is why perhaps it seems so far beyond our control.
Conventionally, happiness is the ability to set meaningful goals and, then, to attain them. I completely believe that.
But a notion of the “good life,” and preferably one that is shared by others in one’s life is what creates the “meaningful” dimension, which is the tricky part in what’s above.
Incidentally, Hamish, for the last 5 years or so, initially as an experiment, but now as a way of life, I almost completely ceased to watch, listen to, or look at advertising. Mindblowing!
