The toxic pursuit of happiness

Today we’ll use a glass of water to find the meaning of happiness. So go grab yourself a glass of water and let’s begin.

There’s an interesting neuropsychological condition called Utilization Behavior. And what generally happens when you’re suffering from that condition is that you lose the ability to inhibit your motor response to the presentation of an object. Now you might think, what on earth does this have to do with finding happiness? Well, let’s break it down a bit and see how this can help us find happiness.

The perception of happiness

The first question is, how can you find something if you don’t know what you’re looking for?

Back to Utilization Behaviour, we said that those suffering from that condition cannot stop their motor response to the presentation of an object. So what do we mean by the “motor response to an object”? You see, we had this false perception that when we see an object, like a glass full of water, for example, we think of grabbing it, and then we initiate the motor response of grabbing it, to drink it. But in the 90s some neuroscientists figured out that the visual system, the one the senses, and the motor system, the one that acts, were one and the same.

Going a bit deeper into that, and this is something that many people don’t know, our eyes are not connected to our brain. Our eyes are brain. The neural retinas we use to see things around us, are part of the central nervous system. They are the reason why you know when to be alert, when to be at ease, when to be asleep and when to be running away from something. You see, during evolution, the eyes were the part of the brain that got squeezed out of the skull and found their place outside of the skull. Any evolutionary biologist and any neuroscientist know that. So basically, your eyes, are brain. This means that there are implications in the way we think we perceive things and in the way we actually perceive things.

So what this means is that we don’t function in a way of seeing something, thinking of its utility and acting on that utility, but instead seeing the glass is grabbing it, and grabbing it is drinking the water inside it. Therefore, those who suffer from utilization behaviour lose the ability to not act on the perception of the object. This means that if you have this condition and I put this glass in front of you, you’d grab it and drink its content. Because the glass of water is drink water.

Or if we walk down the road and I open the door of a random car, you’d immediately go in without thinking. And it’s not because you see the open door and you think, let’s go in, and then you go in, it’s because the door is a walk-through object. And if you lack inhibition, you cannot stop yourself from acting out the perception.

In other words, you would act on the perceived meaning of the object without thinking about it.

This brings us to the scientific finding that you don’t see objects and conclude meaning. You see meaning and conclude objects!

And this is not an easy thing to understand. You can spend the next 10 years thinking just this and the implications you didn’t know it has in your life and the decisions you make every day. Because it changes the perception you think you had about how you actually perceive things!

What I’m saying here essentially is that the primary object of perception is meaning, not objects. So then the question is not how do I find happiness, but what is the meaning that gives birth to the object of happiness? And happiness is such an elusive concept because, you see, there’s a multiplicity of potential valid interpretations of what happiness is for each and every one of us! Just scroll through social media and you see so many different concepts of happiness. The sad truth is that most of them will influence your definition of the meaning you assign to happiness.

This is where I initially thought to end the video, but now we have touched on the issue of the dictatorship happiness.

The philosophy of happiness

The dictatorship of happiness starts with this question: Are you happy? Are you really happy? Why are you not happier? You see, you must always be happy. And if you’re not, there’s something wrong with you.

Travelling back in time, back in ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, India, and even in the Bible, happiness was something that was waiting for you in the afterlife. Life on earth was full of suffering. And the burden you had to carry your whole life on this earth would be measured once you were dead. And only then would you be allowed eternal happiness either in Hades, Valhalla, or Paradise. You get the picture.

But we, humans, were not so happy with this deal. So we decided to bring happiness from heaven, down to earth. And as with most heavenly things, when we bring them down to earth, we make them an obligation. Because we feel we deserve to be happy. So we felt entitled always to be happy. We even keep inventing new things that, in all our naivety, we feel will make us eventually happy.

My mother always used to tell me, as I was growing up, that for her, my happiness was the most important thing. And that’s true for most parents. The happiness of their offspring is their priority. Going back 2 generations, my grandfather had 10 siblings. Only one of them survived, along with my grandfather. Tuberculosis took them all, probably to a happier place. I can’t tell for sure. So my grandfather used to tell me: “Be healthy and help others be healthy too. That’s what matters”.

So how did we go from wishes of health and survival to wishes of entitled happiness? What does it really mean to be happy? What’s the blueprint of happiness so that we can all achieve it?

Well, here’s a secret equation to find happiness. The more we seek happiness, the more elusive happiness becomes.

We, humans, are capable of a very wide spectrum of emotions. And to live life to the fullest, we need to be open in experiencing all emotions life throws at us. There’s no other way to live a truly full life. So why do we only focus on one point of this spectrum? Why do we only focus on happiness?

I think it’s because we have forgotten the concept of high contrast. In other words, how can I appreciate the moment of stillness on a beach, if I haven’t been struggling in front of my computer doing my job? In other words, suffering is a necessity. Because those uncomfortable feelings are the ones that will help us accept the responsibility of life. The responsibility we have towards ourselves and towards others. Happiness comes as an outcome of the process of accepting the responsibility of life.

When we’re not feeling happy, we tend to blame ourselves. We think it’s our fault and that we’re doing something wrong. Or we often blame others and the circumstances around us that create pathological conditions. Then we find new names for those conditions, like burnout, and we even create chemical prescriptions to help us alleviate the pain points of those conditions. And that’s because those new words we create give us a sense of legitimacy about our suffering. That’s our placebo to the avoidance of responsibility of our own life experience.

And it’s that avoidance of responsibility that makes us seek unhelpful ways of being happy.

Here's a suggestion. Let’s see happiness as an experience in life that comes from small actions with intrinsic values. Things that have meaning for you give you purpose and are challenging. And when you experience all of that, happiness finds a way to reach you.

In other words, like we said before, since happiness is an object, like this glass of water, lead a meaningful life and infer the object from the meaning. Do not chase the object to infer the meaning.

I’m Dimitris, and I share tools and insight on how to live a well-lived life!