The Pursuit of Happiness

This brief and informal essay was motivated from the reading of two well-known sentences. The first is the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which affirms: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. The second sentence was stated by a Russian philosopher and writer who developed a philosophical system called objectivism. Regarding happiness Ayn Rand once said: “Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values”.  

Both phrases illustrate that one of the main purposes of life is the search of happiness according to your own interests and values. Almost for everybody this statement sounds very reasonable because we all want to achieve happiness or, at least, that is what we normally hear from people’s wishes. This leads us to ask immediately what happiness is or whether there’s any way by which we can explain the meaning of this term. Have we ever met somebody that we could consider a happy person? Which are the main characteristics of happy people?

Before we analyze this complex issue it´s worth to say that we will start from a premise that for many may appeared very questionable. This whole informal analysis of happiness will be based on the consideration that happiness is a personal decision. Taking this into account we won’t make any formal definition of happiness but to describe those necessary conditions for making such an important decision. It’s important to recall that they are only necessary conditions and therefore having achieved them doesn’t mean the attainment of happiness. Instead, the lack of them is useful to describe what happiness is NOT about.

We will also use another controversial premise for this analysis which indicates that happiness is a long-duration condition. This means that happiness is not affected from everyday situations like receiving an awful new, having an accident, winning the lottery or being fired. Of course happiness is a condition that can be lost but this occurs typically over a long period of time. By this way, having pointed out two important assumptions for our analysis we will indicate two conditions that I consider necessary for happiness.

In the first place it´s important to underscore that happiness needs another human person. This requirement may be complicated to digest because it can be likely misunderstand as the need for somebody to love in a traditional or romantic sense. Far from this interpretation this condition suggests an internal and very deep bonding between the individual who searches happiness and another person or group of persons. Take for example a castaway living isolated from the world in a very remote island. Could he achieve happiness in those terrible conditions? Based in our argument our answer is an outright yes only if the actions of the character in our example are connected with an internal concept of another person distinct from me. In this sense he should think in god, his family and friends or even in the entire world and incorporate these ideas in his actions or intentions. The word thinking is not the proper one because it entails having a rational or conscious concept of other persons when our argument actually contends that you have to include the world, an entity different from yourself, in your thoughts, aims, actions and intentions.

Someone can argue for example that he is authentically happy by learning mathematics completely alone and therefore he doesn’t need the world for achieving happiness or maybe he could need it only for instrumental o practical reasons. Following our argument we would say that if he is learning only for himself it’s impossible for him to reach a long-duration state of happiness. Nonetheless, if he includes the world in his lonely studying he might achieve happiness. The expression “including the world” means that his search for knowledge will also consider, not as a declared intention, to share them with others by teaching, writing a book, explaining them to a fried, making predictions or designing a novel device. If he is looking for knowledge only to be accumulated in his mind or brain without the conception of something different than himself the most likely result is not happiness but sorrow. The same is truth if he is studying only for experiencing the ecstasy of understanding the world or contemplating the nature. Why scientists who have discovered a great issue are so elated when they are writing down their conclusions?

The second condition for happiness is to have dreams, aims or things you want to accomplish but recalling that happiness can´t neither depend on the particular goals of an individual nor in the achievement of them.  Our goals change over time (when you accomplish something you set another new objective) and they depend strongly on the environment (if you are a prisoner you might want to escape) and therefore happiness can´t be subject to these variable conditions. The only important thing is to have objectives and trying to achieve them, no matter if they´re grandiloquent or subtle ones.

The question about happiness is a very complex topic which has been addressed by different religions and philosophical doctrines. Some of them assert that defeating death and transcending time is a central concept to achieve happiness and others recall that pursuing pleasure and having a more hedonistic behavior would bring us closer to happiness. Whatever the truth is it´s a fact that in our lives we have met some people that we consider to be authentically happy. Which are their characteristics? Do they have dreams and have knocked down their interior walls? From where do they draw strength to surpass pain and adversity?