Ready for another happiness entry? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Bertrand Russell says something to the effect of how we should keep our expectations low. If you want happiness and reach for an achievable goal, you’re likely to reach your goal and thus feel happy. Which sounds pretty reasonable at first look.
Then again, who wants to be reasonable?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this happiness thing. Having almost reached the end of the class, I must say that there are two major facts I’ve learned:
1. There are no quick formulas to happiness.
2. Most of the philosophers believed happiness was unreachable, could only be reached through religion or required a stringent regime of everyday self-brainwashing.
None of the above options are all that appealing to me.
The practical advice of “keep your expectations low” clashes with the ambition and optimism of “reach for the skies.” I agree that if you keep your expectations really high, you’re likely to never reach them and thus not feel fulfilled. But is that worse than never expecting much from yourself to begin with?
Russell does place a tremendous value on striving. He believes you should always be learning new things and working to achieve something. Considering how amazing he was, his idea of “aiming low” might be a lot higher than I am imagining. I hope it is because the idea of people having to aim low to stay happy is quite depressing to me.
If we all aimed low and didn’t reach for things that appeared beyond the horizon, how would anything get done? I am willing to admit that different people have different ranges and we’re not all equal in our abilities, but we all have ranges and I’ve always advocated working towards being on the high end of one’s range. I feel like a person can’t really know his range until he tries to push against its boundaries.
Aiming low feels like playing with the cards we’re dealt. Which, at one point, might have sounded like good advice to me, but now it doesn’t. I know that the cards we’re dealt don’t mean everything. Like in a game of poker, we can turn some of them in for new ones. There might be a few we’re stuck with but not as many as most people make it out to be. And what’s the fun in playing the same hand over and over again?
Keeping track is another subject matter that I somehow cannot correlate with happiness. Contentment, maybe but not happiness. But that’s for another day.
For me happiness is feeling more than content. Happiness is achieved when you reach something you didn’t think you would. When you tried really hard, when you put yourself out there on the ledge. When you reached higher than you thought you could. That’s when success is extraordinary. That’s when one gets overwhelmed with happiness.
Or maybe I’m wrong and stuck with eternal unhappiness.
Previously? I Have No Idea.
It seems to me that Russell tended to produce prescriptions for the mass of humanity. I dont believe much of what he wrote applied to precocious British Lords.
I am more interested in those people I know who are thwarted in achieving their goals by their own lack of confidence in themselves or their abilities. What are these people’s plan for happiness? Perhaps it is just security/safety/stability that they really want.
Happiness as the achievement of goals seems to be the preoccupation of over-achievers.
(btw, welcome back!)
you know, i think you make a very valid point. maybe happiness as the achievement of goals is the preoccupation of over-achievers. i never thought about it that way, but now that i see it written like that, it does make sense. And Russell was certainly an over-achiever. As for people who lack confidence in themselves, which is a category i think everyone belongs to in one sense or another, the best way to overcome that, unfortunately, is to try and see that one can achieve, which is of course some sort of a demented cycle since what’s keeping them from trying is their lack of confidence to begin with.
(btw, đŸ™‚ thank you! )
Karen,
I laughed outloud reading the concluding part of your comment — about the cycle. Also, somewhat on topic… I once read an extremely detailed horoscope (the book catalogued the lengthy horoscopes by birth week) and one of the things it said was: You are more comforable excelling among the low than being mediocre with the high. I am scared by how right-on that is. But maybe it has to do with the sense of achievement and accomplishment you were speaking of.