We wish it to each other at this time of year, perhaps more than any (at least if you are a member of Western Civilization), but what is it we're wishing?
Intuition and behavior are parallel for a while but then diverge strongly. When people are "poor" more things do indeed make them happier. Once above that threshold, however, it doesn't make much difference. In fact, nothing much does. Here's some books explaining why.
I'm interested in something different, though. I want to know why people are so interested in happiness as a state. We're obsessed with it and I think it's an outgrowth of conspicuous consumption which began around the 1920s (it existed before, but not at such scales). Amazon returns about 2700 non-fiction books with the word "happiness" in them (about 800 for "satisfaction," 516 for "productive" and 280 for kindness). Ok, so aside from a non-scientific study of Amazon's book choices, why does this matter?
We tend to see our lives as a state rather than a process. We are happy or we aresad or satisfied or whatever. But this is not how it happens in experience. Happiness, sadness and satisfaction are relative measures of change over time. They are emotional calculus. You can't "be" happy, you can only transition your relative happiness index, if you will. Thus, you need to actively integrate unhappiness and dissatisfaction into your life. I'm not saying you have to do things that cause that, but rather that changes in happiness and satisfaction are just part of the human experience.
In Zen, there's this kind of constant idea that seeking zen results in physical punishment. Walking up to a zen master and asking him how to find enlightenment will result in him smashing you on the head. In this way Zen seems like a kind of gag religion where the "master" provides you with a near endless list of meaningless tasks to perform. But something else is going on here. "Looking for" something implies that you and the object of your desire are somehow separated. This separation is created by your mind - it doesn't exist in the "external" world (which we only know through our senses anyway). The act of "looking for [x]" is what separates you from [x]. Thus, the idea is to find something you have to not look for it. Of course, the zen master is smart... he understands the difference between you not looking for something and you trying to not look for something. Trying to not look for it is still looking for it, which creates the separation - and the requisite knock on the head.
What you do is create barriers that you then have to break down. If you think you need a zen master to give you 10,000 meaningless tasks to do before you think you "earn" enlightenment, then that's what he's going to let you do. If you don't think you need that, then you don't. It's already there and you're just playing a game that it isn't. You think that he is the one playing the game, but really you are. If you say "why do you keep making me do these stupid tasks" he'll smack you on the head again - because it's you making yourself do those stupid tasks and he's just frustrated that you keep insisting you need to do them.
It's not that happiness is the elusive thing we need books and studies to find. It's just a part of the rich human experience - always there, ready to be experienced, we just need to convince ourselves to not build up the barriers in the first place.
So, going back to the start. Intuitively we know that more stuff and more money and more whatever will not make us happy (neither will less). In practice, though, we spend most of our lives in pursuit of precisely those things. This dichotomy creates a kind of psychosis from which there appears to be no escape. I think the more compelling model is to stop looking for what will make us happy or satisfied and instead just see it as a series of different experiences all of which have value.
C G Jung saw this in his treatment of undesirable human psychological behaviors. For years people would hide from their "evil" similar to how we avoid "unhappiness." His idea was to "integrate the evil" by bringing it to the forefront. Repressions and ignorance only make these negative experiences stronger. Until we understand them to be another part of the human experience it's difficult to get out of this psychotic state.
This manifests itself in nearly every culture in the form of popular myth or religious text. I would argue that Jesus' confrontation with Satan is this act of integrating the evil, though we have now confused it with suppressing the evil. Jesus doesn't run away or suppress Satan, he directly confronts the temptations the lie before him and in doing so dispells theillusion. Eating, power and even surviving a fall are not important once you have integrated yourself into everything else. The idea of having dominion over the earth is rediculous if you see youself as integrated into it. I'm not going to go into a long monologue about this but I think that what we see here is the intuition that we see one thing at the expense of not seeing another. I think it's a great and basic human myth that echos in our minds.
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