In the quest of happiness man remains sad whole life- Osho

To start with I really hope I am not going to sound too much negative but I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that some people genuinely believe that happiness is somehow a choice. In my opinion, such a belief is one of the most popular myths that humans ever came up with and it’s a very dangerous philosophy to push onto people who are severely, clinically depressed, as that might be the very last drop of guilt/desperation that might push them over the edge and make them commit suicide.

When you are thirsty and you are given a choice to choose only one, what will you prefer? Tasty Sweets or Water. Happiness is not a choice, it is a chain effect of random activities which you can't control. I know someone who is in coma from last 3 months, his family can choose happiness but how could they be happy when their loved one is in Coma and fighting every moment for his life? People get hurt, I get hurt even though I have an option to choose not to get hurt. But, again like I said it is not in our hands to control situations and surroundings.

If it is the case to choose happiness, then after breakup no one would have suffered pain. Losing someone whom you care for a lot do create a void in our life which only time can refill. Passing a judgement without knowing somebody’s situation and position is the most easiest thing we can do. But when we put our feet in their shoes then only we can think about their suffering. When it comes to me, all I can say about happiness/sadness is. I am not an egoist, I am just hurt. And I also know that it can only be filled with time not from an option of happiness.

Just think logically - why in the world would anyone choose to be sad? Just focus on it and ask yourself - who enjoys sadness and feeling miserable? Who likes to be suicidal? If such a being was ever born it probably died as soon as it was born as it enjoyed holding it’s breath and suffocating to death. Therefore, no, happiness is not a choice alone. Sure, it indeed can be indirectly a choice, in the sense of making a series of good choices continuously throughout one’s lifetime and securing a healthy and a happy life, but that’s only if given that you had a healthy brain by birth and/or that you were lucky enough that your brain didn’t experience any serious, clinically significant, physically or emotionally induced trauma. There are millions of people who live very responsible and healthy lifestyles, where they constantly keep making the right choices and are still depressed.

The real truth that so many people can’t seem to grasp, for some strange reason, is that happiness is technically nothing but a bio-electrical and bio-chemical state of the the brain. Whether that sounds crude and depressing itself or not is a whole another topic, and I certainly do not mean to make it sound depressive or encourage any kind of negative mindset in any way, especially since I had my fair share of severe depression and other mental symptoms that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I am just trying to be rational and fight against this dangerous belief that somehow “everything is psychological”, that “happiness is a choice” and that “it’s all in your head”. Well, it is all in your head, but it’s literally physically in your head, and it’s called brain.

It’s absolutely beyond me that for people it’s easy to understand the concept of a kidney disease and they would never say: “Come on! Just snap out of it!” to a person who suffers from some type of kidney disease or to someone who suffers from diabetes, yet for many of those very same people it’s somehow extremely hard to conceptualize that mental health functions in the very same way, i.e. if your brain is not healthy, you will exhibit some mental and/or physical symptoms and should not be blamed for it or be told to “snap out of it!”. The fact that we traditionally categorize health in two groups (“mental health” and “physical health”) is just a terminological thing, and it doesn’t make mental health any less of a physical matter.

I personally believe that such an unjustifiable discrimination between mental and physical diseases comes as a result of two things: The fact that people have traditionally treated consciousness and emotions as a non-physical phenomena and even have a term for it - “soul”. Now, I, as a pretty agnostic person when it comes to words such as “soul”, “afterlife”, or other religious concepts, don’t want to say that those things don’t exist, nor I want to say that they do, but even if we assume that soul definitely exists for a fact, such a non-material thing has to be somehow entangled to our brain perfectly, for the simple fact that scientists have shown over and over again that for any thought, emotion or any action we take whether physical or mental, we can roughly spot a corresponding bio-electrical and bio-chemical reaction in the brain.

People’s unawareness of the modern functional neuroimaging and other recent scientific advances, using which scientists have been able to spot the aforementioned bio-electrical and bio-chemical reactions. As for the regular sadness - sure, it can be treated relatively quickly with a healthy lifestyle and the solving of one’s sources of distress. One does not need medication or any other type of psychiatric treatment for the regular sadness/stress, unless the sources of one’s sadness/stress are unsolvable (but very few things are completely unsolvable).

As for the real clinical depression (the one that doesn’t need an exogenous reason to start manifesting itself) - it’s up to people to be reasonable, to get educated and to fight for investing more in neuroscience, so that neuroscientists, pharmacologists and other related specialists can come up with good, safe and effective treatments for it. And the good news is that we are getting there - mental health care has finally made some serious progress in the last few years when it comes to treatment of depression, anxiety and many other mental illnesses, after decades and decades of virtually stagnating.

Even as early as by the end of this year we might get some way more effective antidepressants than standard ones are generally very safe but statistically not exceptionally effective). Also, some relatively new types of treatment that have shown to be statistically much more effective than standard antidepressants, that, on top of that, have virtually no side effects, Please, invest more of your efforts in helping these causes and stop trying to prove that everyone’s problems are psychological, that people are just “spoiled” and that they should just “snap out of it!”, and this world will be a better place.

I really hope that I have not insulted anyone in any way and that I have not created an impression that I am some “soulless”, pessimistic person. I actually care about moral and spiritual aspects of life more than about any other aspect of it, it’s just that I’m trying to encourage realistic optimism, not the delusional optimism. I like both religious and atheist people, I value people based on their moral qualities not based on whether or not they believe in the existence of God.

Happiness is not a choice, it is an emotion and we cannot control our emotions to order. To understand why is to understand that there are two basic emotions that we all experience, namely love and fear. Variations on the theme of love are: happiness, joy, caring, compassion, satisfaction and contentment. Likewise under the fear-based emotion comes: anxiety, stress, anger, hurt, sadness and depression. This question seems to infer that people can continually choose happiness over sadness, but the truth is emotions cannot be controlled in that way.

Can you imagine it? Someone has just suffered a terrible loss of a loving member of their family. Or a beloved pet? Or someone has been told they have a life threatening disease. Another person has great financial problems and are watching their house and other possessions being taken away from them. So you think they can (or should) choose happiness over sadness? In fact all our emotions are necessary in the scheme of our lives. We can try to manage them in a way so they will not overwhelm us, but we certainly cannot control them and nor should we. Cheers!