No aspect of life is more desired, more elusive, and more perplexing than happiness. We strive for what we believe will make us happy- good health, attractive looks, an ideal marriage, children, a comfortable home, success, fame, financial independence…

But not everyone, who attains these goals, finds happiness. People who possesses everything- youth, health, intelligence, abundant food, clothes, a comfortable place to live, education, a promising future, etc.

What in the world causes this unhappiness?

What is happiness? How does one define it? 

Philosopher Arthur Schonpenhauer: “happiness is an illusive goal that one never reaches. A man is never happy, but spends his whole life striving after something he thinks will make him so”  

Nietzsche” happiness: the feeling that power increases- that resistance is overcome.”

If you turn to modern dictionaries, the concept is anything but clear. One common definition implies that happiness is a state determined by external circumstances-“ characterized by luck or good fortune”. Others as an emotional state, a feeling, a positive mood. Synonymous of happy: glad, cheerful, lighthearted, joyful and joyous. 

These dictionaries tell us that the opposite of happiness is sadness.

Freud writes that when you observe what people “show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives…the answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness. They want to become happy and to remain so.” Freud also observes that ”unhappiness is much less difficult to experience” than happiness. Freud equates happiness with pleasure, specifically the pleasure that comes from satisfying our sexual needs. Quote “ happiness … is a problem of satisfying a person’s instinctual wishes”.

He gives several reasons why it is so difficult to be happy. First, the many sources of pain: illness, aging, the destructive forces of nature, and, must painful of all, our relation to other people.

He gives another reason for our unhappiness. Because sexual love “has given us our must intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for our search for happiness,” people tend to seek happiness primarily in love relationships. But Freud warn that when someone succeeds in finding his main source of happiness in a love relationship, he has “made himself dependent in a most dangerous way on a portion of external world, and exposed himself to extreme suffering if he should be rejected by that object or should lose it through unfaithfulness or death”.

 I’m going to post more tomorrow, if you like you can check Freud’s work “ civilization and its discontents.”