9 Years Later: yep, people still have no idea what happiness is

I wrote the majority of this blog post more than 9 years ago, yet the horrors the world has faced in the past two years inspired me to critically evaluate some of the things I had to say back then. And I think this is one is important.

When I first wrote this post, I had just finished reading this article by Fred Kofman, and executive coach and author of Conscious Business – which I recommend. The post (here) talks about the importance of truth over happiness, and that happiness is not the all-important thing in work life. And actually, I absolutely agree with Dr. Kofmen’s core argument in the article, save for one critical flaw:

Dr. Kofmen seemed to have idea what happiness is.

Or I should say, what he fails to see the difference between Lasting Happiness, contentment, bliss, and euphoria. We use these terms and synonyms and it cripples our emotional vocabulary. Western society – especially English speaking western society – is emotionally underdeveloped enough without making it harder to express through language the nuances of human emotion and experience. At one-point Kofman presents a thought experiment, the red pill blue pill matrix analogy, as his argument against being perfectly happy, because it would be a delusion. He goes on to state that knowing the truth is more important than being happy…

No, knowing the truth seeds and helps nourish Lasting Happiness. Truth is more important than the temporal bliss and contentment, which he goes on to argue against, and call these things (temporal blisses and contentments) bondage – And he is damn right.

However – truth is not more important than happiness, and happiness is not more important than truth. They are symbiotic experiences. Kofman does point out the moral relationship between truth and good, but fails like so many other to grasp that good sustains lasting happiness, even referencing Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape, one of my favorites.

Knowing the truth facilitates rational action and decisions, rational decisions tend towards benevolence, benevolence waters the ground that Lasting Happiness springs from, which drives us to be benevolent, and being benevolent means making rational decisions, to make rational decisions we must seek the truth. Lasting Happiness is not the blissful experiences fabricated through our experiences, but a state of mind developed and nurtured through our choices.

I’ve followed Dr. Kofman for years at this point, and find he is still insightful. I firmly agree that truth sets us free; part of that truth is that we are raised in a society that (still) has absolutely no idea what happiness is, how to achieve it, or how to express it. The worst thing is that we don’t know its value:

A culture (business or social) that teaches, nourishes, and cultivates lasting happiness is one that prizes benevolence and mindfulness, and one that will be free from many of the petty evils of human experience.

Adding to this, I would say that in our world today, with its turmoils and horrors, achieving lasting happiness seems farther away than ever before. And I’ve found, at least personally, that there is a melancholy to the happiness left in the world, a contamination born from countless cruelties that seem to go unanswered every day.

Perhaps if people became more rational, more contented in the good they can do, we could see people come to understand what happiness really is.