Even if we want to buy into the modern happiness cult, most of us can’t help but notice that life frequently just sucks.
I’m all for life and liberty. But the pursuit of happiness? In penning his famous line in 1776, Thomas Jefferson may have been spot-on about unalienable rights. But as a life coach – which, admittedly, he wasn’t claiming to be – he and the entire Western Enlightenment caused lasting and unquantifiable damage.
The Western tradition wasn’t always fixated on happiness. Aristotle, for one, set off in a more mature direction, by contemplating the “good life” more broadly and the role in it of eudaimonia. Regularly mistranslated as “happiness”, that word in fact means “good spirit”. There’s absolutely no need to make this notion either complicated or epic. Ralph Waldo Emerson brought Aristotle right down to earth: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference.”
Buddhism recognises that our natural state resembles being in a dark space, something like the opposite of happiness.For many people, life offers up a diet of pain, poverty, disease or hunger. And even when the menu features ease, wealth, health and cornucopia, people are still stuck with their own minds. And, oh, how the human psyche knows to torture. Its tricks range from anxiety to depression, anger, envy and all the rest.
Basically, Buddhism recognises that our natural state resembles being in a dark space, something like the opposite of happiness. The blame for that, again, belongs to the mind. Even if we’re momentarily happy, for example, we’ll be unhappy as soon as that high is gone. And then we’ll forever crave another hit of happiness, like junkies needing their next fix.
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