Happiness is an emotion. Just like any other emotion it’s an indicator. It indicates your state of being.
When you are in the right place at the right time you are happy. It’s your body’s way of telling you: ‘good job, keep doing this’
The opposite is pain, anxiety or boredom etc. These emotions make you feel bad so that you know you are doing something wrong.
The point is happiness is not the goal of life. Happiness is what we get when we advance towards our goal of life.
So what’s wrong with happiness being the goal of our life? Heres why:
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It’s unstable. Life can’t be all happiness all the time. Suffering is inevitable. If your goal in life is happiness, then suffering makes life meaningless and makes you wanna suicide.
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It can easily be manipulated. You can be happy doing drugs, watching Netflix, gambling or wasting money any other way. All of these are bad in the long run and a waste of human life.
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Many things that give life meaning and purpose also make us less happy. Like, it’s statistically proven that people with children are less happy than people without children. But it’s worthwhile to have children. It’s one of the best blessings of life and not because it makes our overall happiness increase but because it makes our overall satisfaction level increase. And they are two different things that are mutually exclusive.
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Happiness makes a person impulsive. A happy person can be too brave or too generous or too optimistic. This makes them take stupid and dangerous steps that will bring disaster upon them later
The pursuit of happiness irks me. This is what mass murderers use as their arguments. They say if the purpose of life is happiness and most people are suffering then life should cease to exist.
Wrong. Purpose of life is not happiness. Happiness is just another emotion. The purpose of human existence or life in general has to be greater than just feeling one emotion all the time. Even if that emotion feels good.
So what is the purpose of our life? That’s a topic for another blog post..
RaihanRiad 