A very beautiful post questioning our dichotomy of hope/dreams vs motives/actions to feed our addiction to happiness.
"This popular theory doesn’t explain why people are so ignorant after billions of lifetimes of data about what brings happiness, or alternatively why they are helpless to direct their behavior toward it with the information. The usual counterargument to this story is simply that money and status and all that do in fact bring happiness, so people aren’t that silly after all.
Another explanation for the observed facts is that we don’t actually want happiness that badly; we like status and money too even at the expense of happiness. That requires the opposite explanation, of why we think we like happiness so much."
She has some very valid points, Henry David Thoreau wrote "Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulders."
In an evolutionary sense, we are not equipped to bombard any single trait. Anterior cingulate cortice will probably go nuts, satiated and simply cannot handle surfeit of happiness. I think, we use happiness as an euphemism and sought of a white lie, masquerading our real selfish motives from ourselves and making them socially more desirable. The tragedy of this situation is we get into a delusional dissonance about what we really want and what we are actually working towards. No wonder most of us feel lost except those occasional islands of instant gratification.
May be the founding fathers already knew this, no wonder they embraced an abstraction (albeit beautiful) by including "pursuit of happiness" instead of just including "being happy".
Happiness like life is probably about the journey, not a destination.
"This popular theory doesn’t explain why people are so ignorant after billions of lifetimes of data about what brings happiness, or alternatively why they are helpless to direct their behavior toward it with the information. The usual counterargument to this story is simply that money and status and all that do in fact bring happiness, so people aren’t that silly after all.
Another explanation for the observed facts is that we don’t actually want happiness that badly; we like status and money too even at the expense of happiness. That requires the opposite explanation, of why we think we like happiness so much."
She has some very valid points, Henry David Thoreau wrote "Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulders."
In an evolutionary sense, we are not equipped to bombard any single trait. Anterior cingulate cortice will probably go nuts, satiated and simply cannot handle surfeit of happiness. I think, we use happiness as an euphemism and sought of a white lie, masquerading our real selfish motives from ourselves and making them socially more desirable. The tragedy of this situation is we get into a delusional dissonance about what we really want and what we are actually working towards. No wonder most of us feel lost except those occasional islands of instant gratification.
May be the founding fathers already knew this, no wonder they embraced an abstraction (albeit beautiful) by including "pursuit of happiness" instead of just including "being happy".
Happiness like life is probably about the journey, not a destination.
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