Happiness

I’ve been reading my notes from over the year. Here’s one I wrote in January before my surgery: 

Getting the Watson for me was like the universe telling me “all right Blake, good things are going to start happening in your life again. But here’s the catch. It’s going to all happen with your nose clogged. That’s right. Your nose, totally clogged. And it’s going to drip into your throat and make you feel like coughing. Without pause. The whole time.”

In my senior year at Pomona, I became fixated with happiness. Who was happy? Who knew what happiness was? I’d ask a lot of people “are you happy”, and I was usually pretty disappointed with the answers I got. Many people who said they were happy weren’t convincing, and people who said they weren’t happy tended to be at a loss for how to attain happiness.

When the quarantine started, I took an online course called “The Science of Well-Being.” The professor prefaced the course by saying that she herself didn’t feel happy or well. The course was about what makes us happy and what doesn’t. E.g. breaks make us enjoy positive experiences more, so commercials make watching TV more positive; experiential purchases make us feel more alive and less susceptible to social comparisons; we overestimate what our emotions will be like, so doing stuff like getting bad grades, breaking up, or getting married won’t make us feel as bad or good as we tend to think they will—at least not for long, because we adapt to good and bad events. 

But if the professor herself was unhappy, then something was probably missing. Becoming aware of how our choices really affect us and so making more happiness-adjacent choices in everyday life is one thing, but there seem to be missing pillars in here.

Edmond Dantès in Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo says that “I don’t think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.” In Confucius From the Heart, Yu Dan writes that “increasing our ability to hold on to happiness is the greatest thing we can learn.” 

According to Yuval Harari in Sapiens, people experience happiness only through pleasant sensations in their bodies. So “the only thing that can make us truly happy,” Harari writes, “is manipulating our biochemistry.”

By adopting changes in consumption (like vegan-based eating focused on healthy foods and a large reduction of distractions) and by adopting practices like yoga that facilitate changes in the body and mind, I’ve re-engineered, however much, my biochemistry.

Moshe Feldenkrais writes, “Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.” In pranayama, just the act of breathing becomes blissful. Improve the quality of breathing, and of course quality of life will feel improved. Learn techniques like abhyanga for self-massage or Feldenkrais, and it becomes easier to remove tension from the body, and with tension reduced and the body able to relax, life feels better. Heal a chronic cold and by golly, life feels better. Reduce craving for stimulation, and the mind becomes clear and life seems to get better. A general feeling of health and wellness in the mind and body doesn’t equate to happiness, but it means there’s a lot less to struggle against to get there. 

Family and community have a larger impact on happiness than money and health. It’s one thing to become capable and well and another thing to address the fear of loving. Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra “Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.” When I graduated, I was at a point that I no longer felt much love within myself. I had to learn to love myself first, and then I started to find family and community everywhere.

More than anything, happiness consists of seeing the entirety of one’s life as meaningful and worthwhile. We make meaning together, so maybe happiness is synchronizing one’s delusions of meaning with the collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conclusion. That was easy to do at the creative environments I found myself in over the Watson year, but has been harder since I came back home.

Finally, a little passage from The Catcher in the Rye has opened up to me.

“This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit the bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement is designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”

I thought my own environment couldn’t supply me with the feeling of love and meaning, so I looked for it in something else. I looked for some feeling of purity, I looked and looked and I found it outside. I’d given up on finding it at home, and possibly, even in the US. But whatever that purity is, as a character named Jeff in the TV show Community (about community college students) says, “Purity that demands exclusion isn’t real purity.” If I can’t find all-inclusive meaning for myself, then I haven’t found true purity, have I? So long as I’m able, I should keep “looking.”