The Illusion Of Happiness

Happiness is a fragile concept. It is closely linked with absurdity. It is what we vicariously live through, to attain fulfilment. So it becomes sometimes fragile, unimportant and self-defeating.

If happiness is absurdity, then it is a state of flight, away from our immediate experience. It should involve then hope and faith, excluding Fate. So happiness becomes reductionist and becomes simply a state of fantasy, or satisfaction from a subsequent reality.

An average person could say, “I know I’ll be happier with a BMW than a Mercedez Benz” or another “with Michelle rather than Bose!”

Or as a lawyer rather than as a janitor but the problem is, you can’t get into law school or afford the BMW. So for the average person, the obstacle between them and happiness is actually attaining they goal they desire.

But Loewenstein and Kahneman, experts in Social Psychology, believe that the real problem is figuring out which “futures” is going to have the high payoff and is really going to make you happy. So it becomes ‘you can’t always get what you want’. Or as Daniel Gilbert, a professor in Psychology, rightly puts it “you can’t always know what you want”.

That is, we might believe that a new BMW and a beautiful Michelle in the bed and three lovable kids and two hairy pets will make life perfect. But it will almost certainly be less exciting than we anticipated; nor will it excite us for as long as we predicted. Because happiness is a black hole. You keep stashing the hole until you’re uninterested and left with pocket lints. So what you feel about a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, or the defeat of a hated political candidate seems not to matter. It is a state of flight. Basically non-existent.

Economists focus on the financial aspects of decision making rather than the emotional ones. We might ask why? It all seems so small. It isn’t really about money; it’s about happiness.

It is what everybody wants to know when they make a decision. But, it seems to me that sales marketers would disagree, because at the soul of business is the emotion and satisfaction to customers. Happiness for some could be, a series of convulsion, accompanied by a glut of friction, then emission of mucus (that is pretty orgasm, in case you didn’t read that well.) It all chalks up to the malleability of happiness.

Most importantly, according to Loewenstein and Kahneman, from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behaviour — being a “taker” rather than a “giver.” The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire — like hunger — you
satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want.

But one becoming happy when they get what they want presupposes a happiness without meaning, an illusion, which characterises a relatively shallow, self-destructive or even selfish life. Fundamentally, the happy life and the meaningful life differ. Happiness is about feeling good. Meaning, is about being sucked up or fulfilled. People who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they want. Thus, not having enough money decreases how happy they might be and how fulfilled they consider their lives to be.

Happiness is all about giving the self what it desires. So you get a BMW because there is a pop in your salary or because Elvis just got one; or you get a BMW because you work in a firm in VGC and mobility is necessary?

Importantly, how do one react to romantic rejection, or the death of a loved one or sack from the workplace?
Having negative events happen to you, decreases your happiness but it increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Linda dies, and you think life is less worthwhile. You curse life, and understand it is ephemeral, even as you know that without meaning, happiness is an illusion. And an absurdist drama.

By Ezebuike Temple, is a writer and a law student in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
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