I’d edit it a bit: You don’t necessarily have to have parts of your life suck, but you need to have a keen awareness of how life could suck.
Awareness of how one could be paralyzed from the waist down makes one more grateful for mobility.
To fully appreciate happiness, yes. To simply feel happiness, no.
Why do you assume it would be a life spent “loafing” as opposed to a life spent doing things that actually makes them happy?
In my experience and observations, having parts of your life significantly “suck” carries over into the happy parts of your life. And in many cases, it can prevent future happiness. Think of someone who was in an abusive relationship, or is suffering from PTSD. That experience often colors future relationships or creates anxiety, ultimately preventing happiness.
Well, it’s not an axiom, because it’s going to depend on each person and the circumstances. Not everyone learns from mistakes or bad experiences.
Then again, there’s nothing like a life-threatening experience to kick-start your senses. If you almost die of thirst, every glass of water thereafter is going to be wonderfully refreshing, but that pleasure will be tainted with the painful memory of nearly dying of thirst.
The important thing, IMO, is to realize before it’s too late that things are best appreciated for what they are while they last. I’m not very good at it; I hope I’m getting better with age.
I suppose the suck comes and goes along a timeline, but my life today (at least, so far) does not have any suck in it. I do agree there are highs and lows - what I am trying to understand is why when I have a high (happiness), there is an inevitable low (sadness) to shortly follow? And when I have a low, I can count on some sort of high to shortly follow? What’s that all about?
When I experience the extremes, I brace for what comes next - so living simply and without drama seems to work for me. But, my avoidance of drama gets me walked-on a lot, but that is off-topic here.
If you didn’t have to bust your ass at some job all week, weekends wouldn’t be particularly significant as days off to do whatever you want. Every day would be a weekend. Sort of like when you go on vacation. And I dare say it would be MORE enjoyable since you wouldn’t feel this intense pressure to cram all the fun into the 60-odd hours between when you get off from work and when you wake up again in Monday.
While I appreciate the nuances in some of the responses, I maintain that the basic answer is “yes”.
Despite some of the controversy around Kahlil Gibran, let me quote some truths from his writings:
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
…When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
That’s the old “Good can’t exist without evil” argument. It’s total bullshit.
Complex concept.
It gets down to the brain chemistry level. Endorphins. But then also the higher level situations and brain training to induce/suppress the endorphins.
Wow. I am constantly writing and deleting lines. What is happiness? Or absence of it? What does monotony do to your concept of happiness? Does a break in the monotony cause happiness or fear?
The weekend concept.
I have a very frustrating job. Unhappy. But when i have a success in my job, it makes me very happy. But I always look forward to the end of workday Friday. For that matter, every end of workday.
But that does not mean I am happy all night, or all weekend.
It is relational. Situational. Chemical.
The dirt poor can be happy. The filthy rich can be sad.
I was sad because I had no shoes. Then I saw a man who had no feet. While looking at him and thinking about it. I stubbed my toe on a big brick. OWWW!!! Fu@#!! The man with no feet cracked up laughing!
I don’t think so, but then, maybe I don’t know what happiness is. Have I ever felt it? The way I usually think about my positive feelings is ‘contentment’. Meaning that it doesn’t have to be something momentary or fleeting; it can (and does) carry on without having to be bookended by misery. While I’m happy I’m not remembering the unpleasant things - that would make me less happy.
When I stub my toe, I’m unhappy. After I stop feeling it and am thinking about other things, I can be happy again, but not because I remember it, but because I’ve forgotten it.
I was actually thinking as a parent, that a non-trivial part of parenting is actually helping your children navigate that learning process in a healthy way through example and instruction. I can’t help but figure that kids are similar mentally to the way they are physically- small injuries are a big deal to them, because they don’t have any perspective on how a skinned knee or scratched finger isn’t actually that painful.
So I think that part of growing up is actually gaining that perspective to some degree, in that by the time you go out on your own, you’ve both experienced some highs and lows yourself, and you’ve seen your parents handle and navigate their own highs and lows, as well as the shared family ones like deaths in the family, etc…
I’m not sure that anyone’s exactly a blank slate on this by the time they can speak though; if nothing else, they’ve (hopefully) experienced the comfort of their family’s love, and the pain of being separated from it by going to preschool, or being left with a babysitter, etc… Not to mention the more basic good tasting/bad tasting foods and items.
I’m not so sure as an adult if we need to have the extreme highs or lows to be aware of good vs. bad though. I mean, I’ve read plenty of stories of returning veterans having something of a hard time taking some things seriously in civilian life, because their battlefield experiences have taught them that these civilian world “serious” things aren’t actually serious relative to the things they’ve faced in the past. But most people don’t have that sort of experience, so something like a work deadline is a very important thing to them, when the vet has a different perspective which probably goes along the lines of “Nobody’s going to get hurt or killed, so not very big of a deal.”
I think contrast is good- it’s a good thing to have experienced financial hardship at some point, so that you can empathize with people who don’t have as much as you do, and so you can actually appreciate what you have when you’re not suffering financial hardship. But that doesn’t mean you have to be homeless or have suffered grinding poverty either.
Yeah, regarding my post upthread about nearly dying of thirst, I assume that happiness starts immediately, whereas it can take years after ending a relationship badly, for example.
Is pleasure just the absence of pain? That’s like cold being the absence of heat, but not an quality in itself. Suffering is a constant in all life. Like Viktor Frankl observed, it fills a space uniformly and completely, no matter how much of it there is.
We can avoid suffering, inflict it, or work to alleviate it in each other. Those three always overlap, and in the junction lies our individual character.
Happiness is a sensation, but contentment is a state of being. It comes from strengthening and maturation. The best materials are made from nurtured and refined resources, as the best lives are started with nurturing love. However, materials like metal and glass are made stronger through tempering: subjecting them to stresses of heat and cold. Our character and contentment are made the same way.
We might if we figured out a way to survive without the pay. I work on a conference for free that some meeting organizers get paid for, and I do it even after I retired.
Instead of having to experience unhappiness, how about just being able to imagine unhappiness? I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve never had to worry about where the next meal comes from, or what bill I could afford to pay. But having enough money to keep us in good shape for longer than we’re likely to live still makes me happy.
My marriage has never had a really bad stretch. The worst would probably count as good for a lot of marriages. No affairs, no one has ever walked out. But after over 40 years my marriage still makes me happy. While I far prefer being married to living alone, living alone was far from a horrible experience.
I did have one job that did suck for a year and a quarter, but I enjoyed the job before that one as much as I enjoyed the job after it. So, experiencing a bad job didn’t make the good job any better.
Still false for me.
I believe “happiness” or “pleasure” or whatever you want to call it is something you actively look forward to and work towards. “Contentment” is just sort of the absence of pain and suffering.
It’s the difference between looking forward to your weekly poker game with your friends vs feeling content to just sit around in your sweatpants after work passively watching whatever is on tv.
This thread makes me think about the old adage about banging your head against the wall. It feels so good when you stop.