How to be Happy?

Yesterday, I came across a Facebook post by Leela Krishna, a fellow classmate from IIM Bangalore. The post titled ‘We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things’ explained how humans get a dopamine hit from buying stuff.

According to research by Ann-Christine Duhaime, a professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. “As a general rule, your brain tweaks you to want more, more, more”

I was wondering why does our brain tweak us to want more and more? Today is Krishna Janmashtami – the day Indian diety Krishna was born. And incidentally my friend who posted the article on Facebook is also named Krishna! I am currently thousands of miles from two places I call home – India and Singapore. Hence anything Indian catches my attention quickly here in Ukraine including the picture below about which I wrote yesterday. The fact that thousands of miles away from India there is a celebration for the birthday of Indian diety Krishna in the small town of Vinnitsa with a population of less than half a million people is quite intriguing to me.

With the question of "Why brain tweaks you to want more, more, more?" lingering in my mind, out of curiosity, I decided to actually visit the place in Vinnitsa where they were celebrating Krishna Janmashtami. I was amazed to find that there were hardly any Indian at this gathering.

While watching people chant Bhajan - https://youtu.be/G5hSby8T5W0 my brain again wandered to the question of "Why brain tweaks you to want more, more, more?".

I concluded that the brain probably is just seeking “Happiness”! It occurred to me that indeed the Western and traditional Indian way of achieving this Happiness is in fact fundamentally different.

While both East and West are trying to maximize the Happiness equation above, the way in which they approach the problem is inherently different. Both East and West aspire to have the difference between what we attain versus what we desire to be positive i.e. to be happy one needs to have attained more than what one desired. Attaining more will lead to delight while attaining less than what we desire, will lead to misery.

In the contemporary Western world which is focused on capitalism driven hedonist consumerism, one is trying to be happy by maximizing the first variable in the equation i.e. “Attainment”. This explains why brain tweaks us to want more, more and more. The more we hoard the happier we get.

In contrast, the ancient Indian school of thought focuses on the second variable in the equation i.e. “Desire”. It advises lowering desires as there is no end to desires and furthermore attainment is not in our control. We can only exercise control over our desires.

But why is attainment not in our control? With the Krishna Bhajan music playing in the background, I got convinced that a beautiful verse in Gita explains this with great precision. “Karmanye Vaadhika-raste, Maa Phaleshu Kadachana” meaning “You have a right to work (Duty) only, but have no right to the fruits thereof”.

It does not mean that our actions have no consequence and we should just do our “duty” (whatever that means - a thief would argue his/her “duty” is to steal. More on this here) without reflecting on the possible implications of our actions. What this means is that our action is just one of the variables that goes into making the result i.e. fruit of our action. We have no control over thousands of other factors that go into producing a desired result. The key here is “DESIRED”. Attaching a desire to an action is the root cause of unhappiness. The desired result (What I call “Attainment” in my equation above) may never be achieved! And we will be unhappy because our attainment falls short of our desires.

So in summary, we should control our desires by focusing on our needs and not getting tempted by wants. There is no limit to what a human mind is capable of desiring and very often we desire what we don't even deserve. Such desires can only lead to misery.