Human Life
complicated.world
complicated.world
This "insight" depends entirely on the author(s) NOT UNDERSTANDING what is meant by the original quote.
> If you are not happy here and now, you never will be. Taisen Deshimaru
> If you are not happy here and now, you may still be happy in the future. not Taisen Deshimaru
In the original quote, the Zen master is pointing at the idea that you are always in the here and now. Even if, at some other point in time in the future you arrive at happiness, like the second "inverted" quote says, you will still be in the here and now, then.
Yeah, the inverted quotes look prima facie worse or just obviously false to me.
And often yes, it is due to what you have pointed out.
I mean the first inversion sounds like the most unhappy thing a person can do:
>>>Their Inversion: Learn not to let go. That is the key to happiness.
Learn not to let go? Ok, thanks infinite compounding intrusive rumination. Also people are loss averse by nature so very few people will have to "learn" to "not let go".
Then there is this one, where the inverted statement is so awful the had to fudge and qualify the whole thing.
>>> Quote: Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.
>>> Their Version: Happiness sometimes is being pained in body and troubled in mind.
>>> The real Inversion: Happiness is being pained in body or troubled in mind.
With the word "learn", the meaning I get is not really "to attain such ability" (which is natural), but "to get accustomed to doing". And "to let go" or "not to let go" may be also be understood as "give up" vs "don't give up", as opposed to the suggested rumination of the past.
"Do not belabor wisdom to examine it;"
- Niutou Farong
pasted this into ddg. now i know my mental illness. are you fucking kidding. (thank you)
Learning to suffer means that it is effortless, automatic, unconscious, same as one would learn to play a piano piece or drive a car or walking. At some point the activity requires little if any conscious thought.
A lot of these sayings are not how things work, but a fairy-tale that sounds nice and we wish were true (this is true of most zen stuff). Basically they are fantasies that reality is less unfair/arbitrary and imaginings that happiness is attainable by everyone in every situation.
I applaud the article for mentioning say, the importance of sex in happiness. This is something that you'd never get in a wishy-washy zen yoda-speak quote, but which is almost certainly true and probably worth admitting at a more conscious level.
(zen) buddhism is a lot of things but certainly not a fairy tale. The basic assumption is that suffering is the basic state of life, that life is very unfair and arbitrary and that what you're going for is not even happiness but elimination of desire and ultimately the self. Very non happy go lucky as far as philosophical systems go. The article really has a very botched definition of happiness going on which it defines right in the beginning:
>For us, happiness is the target state that we want to achieve, at which we would be in our ideal condition
Happiness isn't a target state or object to be grasped, which is very trivial to show. Just imagine you get everything on this shopping list of happiness. Now you wake up the next day, what do you do? Life is always in some state of non-equilibrium and in particular if you do, as the article suggests, define happiness as a sort of string that pulls you along.
Happiness is something we should work towards constantly. It makes me happy to go on hikes and see beautiful places it makes me happy to eat good food it makes me happy to spend time with loved ones and it makes me happy to build cool things. I pursue all these things happily, to achieve the state of happiness that they provide for me. You ask what happens if I achieve all these things? Well so far this week ive achieved 3 of 4 of the examples above and I am still happily pursuing doing them again.
Buddhist practice, in general, isn't interested in creating fantasy ideals, and it also isn't really a mere philosophy - it's a practical method with some ethical and social teachings. That method is designed to bring you into intimate contact with the "realities of desire and personhood", which most of us are almost entirely ignorant of, and avoid confronting through the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.
Actually, happiness is the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice - happiness free from conditions. If you had an accident during a hike and couldn't hike any more, you developed issues digesting certain foods such that you couldn't eat what you consider good food any more, your loved ones passed away or left, presumably your happiness would also take a hit with those things, the things you depend on for happiness. Buddhist practice doesn't preclude doing any of those things, it just trains the mind not to rely on them for wellbeing, and to find a deeper source of wellbeing that can always be contacted regardless of current circumstance.
Sadness and suffering too, are a natural part of being alive and isnt something we should avoid. If I lost the ability to hike I would be sad. Because thats the appropriate and healthy reaction to losing something you care about. This sadness and suffering is part of the natural process of grief. When I have lost loved ones I have deeply grieved them with my entire being. I have mourned with every ounce of my self and eventually come through the other side able to move on. I would have it no other way. This process does not preclude finding other sources of happiness later but it is important to go through.
That "deeper source of wellbeing" you talk about is the fantasy part. Can you touch it? can you tell it you love it? Can you share it around a table with people you care about?
"Desireless-ness is wisdom. The two are not different; they are the same."
- Ramana Maharshi> Basically they are fantasies that reality is less unfair/arbitrary and imaginings that happiness is attainable by everyone in every situation.
No. They are guidance on making the best of an arbitrary reality.
"If you're happy here and now, just remember you won't be in the future."
That's one I could get behind.
Edit: As akprasad pointed out below, I was thinking of koans.
I was pretty skeptical of that Buddhist quote the moment I saw it. If you want the tl;dr version of Buddhism, that's the 5 Precepts: that is the boiled down, maximally condensed "minimalist" version. If you want more than that, you have the Eightfold Path. It's already getting long, but hey, if you want everything in bite-sized form, that's as close as you'll get.
So when I saw "all of Buddhism" in 4 words I thought: no, I don't believe that - I'd sooner believe that's a misattributed quote. And while I couldn't find an exact source online, this summary from ChatGPT summarizes my take.
The quote "Learn to let go. That is the key to happiness." is often attributed to the Buddha, but it does not appear in any of the traditional Buddhist scriptures. It is likely a modern paraphrasing or interpretation of Buddhist teachings on attachment and impermanence. The Buddha did teach about the importance of letting go of attachments and desires as a path to enlightenment and inner peace, which is a central theme in his teachings. However, the exact phrasing of this quote cannot be directly linked to any specific Buddhist text.
> One could draw a snap judgment from this analysis and conclude that money, in fact, simply buys happiness. I think that would be the wrong conclusion. Clever sociologists will always find new ways of “calculating” that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount. But the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity. They rise together and fall together. Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness. High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives. In this light, the philosophical question of what contributes most to happiness is just the beginning. The deeper question is why the trinity of happiness is so stratified by income—and whether well-being in America is in danger of becoming a luxury good.
* https://archive.ph/4ofJ6 / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/happiness-...
Our entire society is structured around wealth/money being the single transferable / unit of exchange for time, freedom, self actualization, property, security, healthcare outcome stratification, etc.
So the whole damn thing is explicitly structured as money being the proxy unit for all the things we want and like. So it's obvious that most of the signal will be there.
The one thing that can never be removed from these equation is wealth.
Be wealthy and surround yourself with other wealthy people for X tranche of wealth.
Everything else is just obfuscation.
While there may be other factors and humans are a messy biological lot so "non normative" individuals certainly exist but there is only one BIG signal that never goes away.
I don't think all three necessarily rise and fall together. You can be filthy rich and have a terrible family or social life.
I think the 'subtler truth' is that financial stress harms family and social life and you could argue financial stress is the biggest thief when it comes to happiness. Assuming 'finances, family and social fitness' are the three prongs of happiness trinity.
Sound as in true? Or sound as in more comfortably fits one's current set of beliefs?
Many of these quotes are getting at the unexamined assumption that happiness can be found anywhere but right here. The point of many of the quotes is introduce some curiosity and question the fundamental assumptions that run your life.
If you are steeped in the mindset of chasing happiness, of never finding it here, and you're simply looking to confirm that, then of course inverting the quotes is going to fit better with your world view. In that case, keep chasing it and chasing it until one day you wake up and realise it never seems to arrive. Then the quotes may hit differently.
Considering that chasing happiness is the complement to contemplation, is considering that contemplation excludes happiness.
>We haven't managed to find any quote which would touch on that
The complement to contemplation is not chasing happiness, it is participating in the creation of what can be contemplated, and you can find plenty of quotes about that, like: "The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul." (Dieter F. Uchtdorf), or: "Creativity is intelligence having fun." (Albert Einstein). That can be whatever kind of creation: procreation, pieces of art, etc.
Cleverness and wisdom are orthogonal. It is extremely clever to seek to reinvent all human philosophy from first principles. It is also extremely unwise. At best, you'll waste time achieving nothing, since it is impossible in one lifetime for you to recapitulate the canon. (Also pointless, given the canon already exists.) At worst, you might achieve nothing and also drive yourself insane.
That youthful energy and that drive to understand the world are both highly meritable qualities, as is the intelligence on display. Take those and do almost anything else with them but this, and looking back you'll find your time was better spent.
(Also, if you're going to try to be so mysterious about who and where you are, don't immediately give away that you're Polish.)
E.g. if you think about the recently-trendy problems of "free speech vs platform moderation", or "privacy vs security vs comfort", or "political correctness vs truth" - I struggle to find comprehensive answers, but if you could point me to such places I'd be grateful. There are of course plenty of interesting reads, Hacker News being an aggregator of lots of them, but it's difficult to find one which takes the arguments and provides some reasoning on where they stem from rather than finishing on something like "obviously privacy is important", "free speech, because of freedom", or "moderation, because hate speech is harmful".
Also, we've tried to spend our youth energy on a few different things already, this is one more experiment, don't worry, we have lives. In fact, I try to follow what is preached in the article and engaging in this project falls into the category of "personal mission".
(But you're right that there is some Polish element to it, mum's the word...)
(No judgment; I share the love of disputation for its own sake, if in a more autodidactic style - which is why they have found me so annoying, interpersonally at least: I don't know their rules well enough to play by them, but do tend to say things they find they have to take seriously. Or at the very least, I've often annoyed one of them that way...)
I think I see now why the quotes, but there's nothing to be gained by swapping words around. None of those purports to be the answer to so hefty a question as "what is happiness?" Each, and I grant this part is heavily implicit, poses only an answer, which some have found satisfactory but no one is obliged to. They're not so much there to agree or disagree with, as to encourage you to think about why you do either and why you do either - they're not there to tell you how to be, but to help you understand who you are.
As I said, I can't give an answer that satisfies - at most, I can give an answer that knows it's only a statement of belief, and have. Few seem ever to manage so much, and from this lack I think springs all of politics, because also from this lack I think springs the vast majority of mass human violence and much interpersonally besides, and if a better tool than politics exists for placing distance between essential disagreement and violence, I can only assume it has not yet been discovered because otherwise we'd all be using it. (I hope we'd all be using it.)
In the end, given the questions you cite here and what I've read of your work on your site, I think that must be what you're trying to solve. It's an honorable occupation, and I'm glad you find it enjoyable! You're far from the first to attempt it, and I hope I may be forgiven for doubting your chances in this field as much as I'd doubt anyone else's - but as long as you go on finding it a pleasant pursuit, I'll go on being wrong to have said it wasn't worth your effort; as definitions of happiness go, that seems to me about as good as any.
(To the other point, you might consider being broader in your range of named citations, and of supported languages.)
- you seem to say that the only reason for politics (and generally speaking disagreements, wars, etc.) is genuine difference in beliefs (ground truths), which come deeply from the heart and as such are not subject to intellect or logic. In my observation, these beliefs are not all similar in nature. Some are truly foundational like "I like people" / "I'm indifferent whether people exist or are happy", however there are plenty of higher-level thoughts, to give an example from the other extreme on that axis: "I like party X" / "I think party X are all thieves", which are very often described also as beliefs, but in fact, they can be subject to division into smaller components using pure logical process, until eventually you reach the much more foundational level of beliefs. What I've observed is that people are unaware of the fact that their beliefs can be analysed this way and instead just fallback to "we just disagree on beliefs, we will never agree". This is a useful method of manipulating people, to divide them into groups which believe that are opponents, while in reality they needn't be.
- you say that no better tool (to close that gap of understanding high-level problems) has been created and seem to imply that this means that it cannot ever be in the future. Even if it could, perhaps that would be a product of some reputable scientific society or a big corporation, and not a modest group of editors of a philosophical website. If you go to the extreme and expect anyone to deliver an ideal tool, then you're right that it may never come to exist. But what I believe everyone can do is try to make an ever so slightly better tool than the one we have right now. That's what we're trying to do and that's what I'm certain you could do too, we don't aspire to be superheroes.
(Sorry for such a delayed response, a random life event cut in)
"Very little is needed to make a sad life" - not Marcus Aurelius. Sadly truthy.
"If you are not sad here and now, you never will be" - not Taisen Deshimaru. Sounds like it means the same as the original.
"The greatest sadness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness." - not William Saroyan. That you could live a long life with no happiness, sounds pretty sad.
"Sadness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind." - not Thomas Jefferson. Sadness is something more.
> He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how
This seems to be the opposite of what the author has to say here.
When I think of the people in my life that are happiest, they are the ones that are least interested in having nice things and the ones that are most willing to endure a little pain in order to build meaning into their lives.
The ones who are not willing to make that sacrifice, who chase happiness for its own sake... for them, pain causes suffering, which compounds the problem because it throws in their face that they've failed in their quest for happiness. For the others, it's just a momentary annoyance, like bad weather.
I'm with Neitzche on this one.
Reminds me of the experiment with rodents pushing the morphine button until death, and of the recent opioid crisis.
This is a terrible redefinition and is obviously not what the quotes were talking about. You might as well just write, the ideal is the ideal.
He argues that true happiness comes from being-at-work in accordance with virtue. And that virtue can be cultivated through habit. So in his scheme, you can work towards sustained happiness.
Three of the important virtues he devotes separate chapters to are: courage, temperance and practical judgment ('phronesis', sometimes translated as 'prudence').
Of course, everyone develops their own map on how to understand and go about their lives. Just thought I'd share a pointer to the one in this work.
Its very easy to say these things so I never put much weight to them. I am just going off my own experiences.
What you might consider virtuous like helping others may lead down to lonliness and feelings of uselesness when circumstances change and theres no one around. If you work on being independent you may one day find you have a longing to connect. When being carefree seems to make you happy, one day it may lead to making terrible decisions.
The human brain, and all of life seems to be built on opposites, I don't believe eternal happiness can exist, at least not for everyone.
Sounds very much like the definition of Dharma.
Maybe that's why happiness is so hard. So many promising roads leading out.