Happiness

Desire is the reason behind all the suffering.

You never relate happiness to science. Do you? You always believe happiness is a subjective experience, to a large extent it is a subjective experience.

After overcoming war, plague, and famine, finally, happiness is in the scope of the human agenda. Modern humans do not live under the constant fear of war, plague, or famine. They all are the problems of the past, now we fear not getting a promotion or good grades. The aftermath of the scientific revolution is unimaginable improvement in human life. We no longer die in the fifties, no more than one of every three children dies before reaching adulthood. Due to scientific development in the last few centuries, we are living in heaven as compared to our previous generation. But humans are not creatures that easily get satisfied, we keep on striving for more. And now, more than ever we strive for happiness, don’t we? You probably don’t think about being happy all the time, you have other things to worry about.

Look around you everyone is encouraging you to be happier. And most importantly you want to be happy. Yes, OK course you are chasing money, success, fortune, fame, and partners, in this materialistic world, but aren’t we doing it all to be happy? When you gain something valuable in life, you feel immensely happy like a perfect partner or an admission to an elite college. It feels amazing all pain and fear disappear as you feel floating in the sky. But, as may you have guessed, it doesn’t remain eternal. It disappears just as it came. And once again your new fear, worry, and old guilt take control of you. It just ends up being a pleasure for a brief moment. That’s the reason you were told to enjoy the moment of peace and happiness because it will pass away. You don’t feel happy for past achievement in times of current failure, you certainly don’t feel happy when your spouse break your heart or when you score low in your dream college.

Let’s tackle this scientifically. Biology doesn’t want you to be happy all the time. Your biology didn’t develop you in this way to make you feel eternal happiness. Evolution doesn’t want us to be eternally happy but rather to survive and reproduce to pass our genes. It actually, uses happiness to fulfill its purpose. It gives you a blissful and pleasant sensation when you help in survival or reproduction. Suppose, a squirrel who eats a nut feels blissful and rather than being anxious for another nut to survive, just feels eternally satisfied and happy. He will live a very happy and very short life. His genes will not pass to future generations and mutations will end there. Similarly, it is necessary for you to feel super happy when you gain a college degree, praise, and social status, and when you pass your genes to the next generation. Not finished with biology, yet, but we will catch up later.

Biology is not the only science related to happiness, and so is physiology. We as humanity have achieved a lot even the poor of USA are more now, privileged than the rich of the USA a hundred or two hundred years ago. We all enjoy facilities that are unavailable even to the rich of past centuries. But this fact certainly does not make us happy. Humans always want more, if not individually then collectively. Our capitalist economy, is ever-growing and it is not possible to stop it at some point, it won’t settle for equilibrium but will shatter to pieces. There is an expectancy effect with happiness. As life improves, the expectancy balloon inflates even more. Many would argue that it is not the result that makes us happy, but the process. Shouldn’t we enjoy the path to success? Well, their futile attempt to bypass the psychological effect, just end up transferring moment of happiness. This argument completely fails to recognize the actual meaning of happiness. Make us wonder did we actually knew it.

This leads us to think about what happiness is. Where does it exist? We tend to believe happiness is a metaphysical concept that cannot be understood by materialistic science. But happiness is actually as realistic as chemicals. Hitherto, they are chemical. The feeling we feel is not gifted by some intelligent design, but they are biochemical in our body. They are products of your own biochemistry. Feeling in the human body act as an algorithm, to help us survive.

We don’t feel happy because we heard some good news, we feel it because of please to sensation in our body. Without this pleasant sensation, any good news won’t have any meaning. You don’t feel like floating in the sky when you hear news of your promotion after having a fight with your loving parents in the morning. M S Dhoni when finished off World Cup in style didn’t feel happy for hitting the ball very hard, but because he feels a very blissful sensation in his body. All happiness can be understood by the functioning of a few chemicals in your brain. Then, to actually be happy we have to manipulate our biochemical system. But is it good for us? Doesn’t the biochemical system help us survive as I explained earlier?

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