Meaning?s Search For Man

The Meaning?s Search For Man:

Over the course of a lifetime, people feel a wide range of different emotions along a broad spectrum, at varying levels of intensity. The prime emotion, which acts as a marker for all other emotions and contains within itself a blend of other feelings, appears to be happiness—the feeling of joy. Maybe the most dangerous and addictive feelings of all. It involves a set of complicated chemical reactions that create within us a purpose-oriented system of action, one which creates cultures, values, and religions. It was in the modern age, with the collapse of the religious establishment that had shone a spotlight on supra-human, existential meta-objectives, those greater than the individual, that there emerged what we call egoism.

????????????Egoism, simply put, places the “ego,” or the self, center-stage. Egoism involves utilizing one’s own desires, feelings, and thoughts as a guiding light, as an end-point marker dictating one’s actions and directing one’s center of gravity before one makes decisions. This feature of modern secularism finds expression in every aspect of Western life—from mega-malls and expensive fashion brands to cinema and books, all of which share the same?intensely?megalomaniacal consumerist culture, which to a large extent symbolizes man’s status, and the consumption of which consequently triggers the release of the chemicals that create our sense of happiness. It is this phenomenon that forms the subject of this paper.??

????????????It is interesting, in this context, to reflect on human life from a metaphorical bird’s eye view, focusing on two moments. The first is the lowest point in a person’s life, when they were, or will be, the saddest in their lives; The second is the high point of a person’s life, when they experience peak happiness. We shall separate these two moments and draw a thick line between them, representing our “spectrum of human happiness”. The moment of greatest sadness will be 1 along our spectrum; the moment of greatest happiness, 10. We shall thus create an artificial yardstick of happiness, along which we can demarcate a person’s happiness at any given point in their life.?

????????????For illustration: let us assume for a moment that a person experiences 1 on the happiness scale after the death of his beloved mother from a difficult illness and 10 when he holds his baby daughter in his hands after several unsuccessful pregnancies, and with every other moment in his life expressed somewhere in between. Thus, for example, a surgeon who saves someone’s life work after a gruesome traffic accident might experience a happiness level of 6, and an artist disappointed by a painting in which he invested many weeks of work will experience 2. All other degrees of happiness will find their place along our spectrum.?

????????????This theory can be applied to even more complicated examples, and we shall now discuss the cases of two people. The first person is Emma, a woman who lives in Western Europe, where she was born and raised, and who has often felt happiness along a variable spectrum. Emma has no religion and naturally, like everyone else around her, wishes to maximize her personal profit: her feeling of happiness. We can therefore describe Emma’s raison d’être as follows: assuming that Emma goes to sleep every night with a certain sum of the total happiness that she has experienced, which accounts for every time she has felt happiness (or sadness) at whatever level of intensity throughout her day, Emma’s purpose is to go to sleep with the greatest possible happiness score, whereby above a certain low score, her sadness becomes genuine, unadulterated happiness. We can therefore summarize Emma’s raison d’être on Planet Earth in an egotistical manner, seeking to have as many genuinely happy (i.e. non-sad) experiences as possible, at the greatest possible intensity. Emma’s “success” in her old age will be measured by the sum of her total nightly happiness scores and whether it is higher than the average in her surroundings – individuals from a similar background and upbringing. In other words, the more happiness Emma will feel, the better.

????????????Our second example is Tamer. Tamer was born in a small village near the vast deserts of the Sahara. He lives in “extreme” conditions and does not have easy access to electricity, potable water, medical services, or many other utilities that Western individuals take for granted. From a bird’s eye view, Tamer also has two key moments in his life, providing our metric of the happiest moment in his life and, at the other extreme, the saddest. Therefore any other feelings that Tamer experiences throughout his day, from a birth of a child to a fatality due to medical infection, will be represented by a number along our happiness spectrum from 1 to 10.?

????????????At this point, we should make an important clarification before we continue delving into the depths of the philosophical theory known as the “tragedy of happiness”: this happiness score, which quantifies an intrinsically subjective feeling, is nevertheless absolute and comparable to other people’s happiness scores. This is a fundamental premise of this theory. In other words a feeling that would receive a score of 5 for one person and a feeling that would receive the same score for somebody else embody the exact same subjective feeling.?

?????????????Of course, all subjects fall differently along the scale, and the circumstances that inspire happiness differ between person and person, but the subjective feeling of an individual whose happiness level is 5 is no different from somebody else experiencing feelings of the same happiness level. This introduces the dilemma at the heart of this paper: since everyone experiences feelings along a similar spectrum, and since what varies between people is their personal circumstances and the intensity of the stimuli that animate them along the spectrum, we must ask the question of whether there are any changes we can make to our life circumstances in order to be able to influence our feelings for the better.?

????????????A point of clarification: from a broader human perspective, focusing on the intergenerational collective and not on the specific individual—is it possible that changes to our life circumstances have no bearing on our happiness scores? Could one’s progressive blindness about the circumstances of one’s own life thoroughly uproot human progress? Progress, after all, is supposed to improve our lives, so is it possible that an absence of happiness, or the inflexibility of happiness levels, in fact renders the whole of human progress utterly redundant??

????????????Why do we as a human society have any incentive to improve our lives if over the course of generations, we have become emotionally dulled to the advantages that better living standards have to offer? What possible reason could there be for immense economic investments in technology, for murderous wars over natural resources, for zealously isolationist politics, or for battles between the egos of individuals and nations if intergenerational happiness levels remain stagnant? Why do we tend to think that the happy and progressive Canadian nation is happier than Papua New Guinean society if, on a personal level, this is untrue? After all, it has already been proven that academic metrics for happiness are Western, and were created by Westerners for Westerners, and therefore that interpersonal happiness is impossible to compare.??

????????????However, we can safely conclude that technological progress carries no meaning for intergenerational happiness and that a given level of technological progress cannot tell us anything about a particular subject’s happiness levels, despite knowing his nationality or citizenship. Since this is the case, we must ask: why is there progress at all? Is it human curiosity that necessarily produces a reality that facilitates and sustains technological progress? Because if this is the case, then why is there such a profound difference in the technologization of different societies? Are Westerners any different from Africans in their capacity for innovation? Probably not.

????????????This theory maintains that it was the selfishness of a limited number of people that fostered progress and drove it forward. These people are known informally as “engines.” These were the leaders of humanity, as this ethos teaches. As we have previously claimed, man is an egoistical creature and therefore our starting position was that the reason that these people, including the Wright brothers, Nikola Tesla, and Leonardo Da Vinci, undertook their endeavors was for their personal benefit. For their own narrow gain. In other words, because by pursuing innovation, they would push their subjective happiness levels significantly higher than the average around them.

????????????It is worth noting that studies have found that happiness levels among lottery winners and survivors of tragedies are the same after several years. In other words, desensitization is not the preserve of a narrow few; it is applies to everyone, and in every situation. It is a process of collective emotional normalization. Our premise is that these “engines” of progress wish to keep advancing their own personal happiness levels, as their extraordinary abilities boost the benefits of technology for the whole of society while nevertheless not increasing collective intergenerational happiness to any detectable extent.

????????????Is it possible that such progress is redundant? Is it possible that keeping Western nations at the same levels of technology as all other nations will be most efficient? The answer is likely: yes. This theory states that when we focus on an environmental approach, wishing to reduce the totality of energy-intensive activities around the world, we conclude that human progress, beyond its catastrophic impact on the environment, also has anti-positive effects for happiness. It therefore necessarily follows that human progress is negative and that we, as a society with an environmental consciousness, have no interest in promoting it.

????????????In this respect, this theory emphasizes the futility for humanity of human progress, turning our attention to the tragedy created between the rows of binary coding that we call technology. When society seeks to maximize its happiness by “improving” its life circumstances,??it does not create any improvements in practice but rather generates an emotional stasis, one that finds expression in the social average embedded in the genetic code of each society. The tragedy is that not only do our happiness levels not rise, remaining static, but that we actually diminish them through the environmental destruction we wreak in our efforts to create this fake technological progress.??

????????????Man would do well to suspend his zealous pursuit of progress and focus on himself, in the here and now, on what matters and on what does not, on the non-fantastical and the tangible, and on the non-selfish collective. For his own sake. For the sake of this planet.