The metaphysics of happiness

 "Ask yourself if you're happy and you cease to be so" - John Stuart Mill

 Humans endeavor is mysterious, and how we run after things is no less unclear. The most mysterious and strange thing we have ever come to encounter is certainly our own self. The self – whatever it maybe – is what defines who we are, it is the responsible why often people struggle with life, it’s the cause why they complain about its meaningless nature. We are conscious beings, that is, we know what it means to be happy, and we can tell how horrible it is to suffer. For me, it is this realization that makes everything matters, either good or bad.

You can doubt everything, you can be skeptic about being, but I doubt that anybody doubts the feeling of suffering. You might think that the feeling of happiness, the feeling of being in love and the feeling of serenity are mere delusions but not the feeling of pain and suffering. In my view, this is the first building block to argue for our being. It is this feeling what pushes people to think that life is pointless, to prefer not being over being, to think that the best for us is to not be born at all, because, as pessimistic philosophy pointed out, life is nothing but a journey of suffering and a struggle for survival.

You might expect to hear it only from nihilists but I heard it from all sorts of people. According to materialist nihilists, it is impossible to make any sense of life if it is the result of cold, deterministic, uncaring interactions between matter and energy. What meaning could one assign to trajectories of particles that are describable with mathematical equations? Accordingly, if you sum up the huge number of atoms of your body and how the particles forming them interact with each other and with the world surrounding you, then can you tell who are you? Aren't you anything but a ghost inhabiting these atoms and deluded by your "consciousness". Probably, atheists think, one day, we'll be able to describe the immense number of matter particles in the whole universe with precise models and come to see everything as mere simulation and inevitable deterministic fate of matter and energy. If that is the case, then what's happiness for us? What's pain? What does it mean that we are obliged to face all these different emotions through our lifetime, since nothing is a choice? If you hold this world view, you definitely think there is nothing you can do and everything is imposed on you.  There is no escape that whatever emotion you experience, be it joy or pain, is an inescapable fate. And therefore you realize that the point of living is meaningless in the first place. I understand the position of this philosophy, despite my conviction that it is a naïve and coward way to see life.

If nihilists have their reasons, what about religious people? Is it possible to be a nihilist religious? Indeed, Buddhism and a lot of ancient mythologies have recognized that life is suffering. To overcome this suffering one should transcend his own nature, that is, to devote himself to a greater purpose that is worth the suffering. The whole foundation of religion and the metaphysics of meaning are somehow predicated on this idea – to transcend human nature.

What’s the purpose of belief if it does not provide you with meaning? If metaphysics can't save you from the hell of being drown in nihilism, then there must be something wrong with it – psychologically speaking. People presuppose that the meaning they ought to find is “happiness” and as long as they haven’t found it, then, they think life must be meaningless. No religion ever tells you that the point of your life is to be happy.

The problem of both religious and nonreligious people is that they ask the wrong questions. They want to be happy and they ask what they shall do to be happy. I see dozens of posts on Facebook, I hear many advices from friends and I encounter it a lot in magazines, all, they give advices on how to be happy. Happiness is the ultimate goal of all simpleminded people.

We want to be happy and we want to maintain that feeling. Happiness is nothing but the result of your reward system. When you get something that enhances your chances of survival, you feel happy, when you don’t, you feel the other way around. Even if your reward system is responding to a favorable situation, after a short time the feeling vanishes away. Happiness in the mind of the simple minded intellect is purely a physical thing.

When you are involved in questioning and discovering, to the point that you forget yourself, you forget that you are hungry and need to eat, you forget that you are wasting a chance of mating with “highly desired mate” and when you no longer care what car you’re driving or what home you’re living in, then, you have figured the secret of happiness. Intellectual curiosity is full of mysteries and inquiries; it satisfies a desire in you that is transcending your whole nature.   Your primitive reward system no longer tricks you and you are no longer naïve to track “happiness” because you are already happy and you should not ask yourself if you’re happy.