Happiness is a seat in the sun and someone else taking the decisions

Well, according to you lot anyway.

Let’s take the absence of choice, mooted by cvj and Mila (below) as a possible explanation of the conundrum of Filipino happiness.

There’s something in that. Perhaps that is part of the reason why many of us spend much of our lives performing work we despise—not only does it pay the bills, it also provides an excuse for why we never wrote the book, opened the restaurant, founded the religion.

Take another example of choice deprivation, Sudoku! Have you encountered this torment, the greatest time waster known to man? I was sudokued a couple of months ago on our trip to Europe and already feel as though I have spent half my life staring at that stupid grid (the Inquirer has a daily puzzle). Still, I gotta admit that there is something to be said for reducing your variables to 81 squares.

And yet and yet … if there was one thing communism was good for, it was limiting your choices, but did Stalin make people happy? Obviously not. If you were looking for an image of human misery, you could do worse than a Soviet bread queue.

So what differentiates the miserable Soviet queuer from the blissful jeepney passenger?

Climate for a start and I agree with Carlos (below) on that.

However, it seems to me that the main difference between the two is the perceived justice or injustice of the situation. The unfortunate bread queuer was inundated day and night with propaganda about the glories of the Soviet life yet had to endure a reality that was completely at variance with the myth. Not only that, he or she had to suffer a spray of slush as a member of the nomenklatura swished by in a Zil limo.

How different the condition of the jeepney passenger, secure in his knowledge of his place in the cosmos, low though it may but be. There is that guy with the beard at the top, there is “sir”, “ma’am”, and, perhaps most important of all, there is always someone below you. Life is immutable, so why get an ulcer worrying about it?

Yet, if its greatest exemplar is a 14th century European peasant, of what use is this state of happiness anyway?

Comments

[cvj]

"if its greatest exemplar is a 14th century European peasant, of what use is this state of happiness anyway?"

To the individual, happiness is essential for survival. As an indicator of national well-being, it is of no use. Since the condition of 'happiness' can arise from both fulfillment and deprivation, it would be meaningless and misleading to lump all individuals' happiness together and come up with some sort of 'happiness index'.

[torn]

Cvj — I agree with what you say about the difficulty of assessing happiness en masse, but I wonder whether it is even essential for individuals. That depends a bit on the purpose of living I think — if it “to create”, for example, then being happy is probably a big disadvantage. In fact the spur to achieving just about anything is usually a well of personal unhappiness (how many biographies begin with idyllic childhoods?).

So I guess the answer is to keep yourself just above the suicidal level and go forth and do great things.

[Major Tom]

In my mind, happiness is the most subjective of all facts of life and there's exactly no way of equating it empirically and this may just render every data culled or statistics collected mostly irrelevant. Yet, it might be mostly possible that the poor every day Filipino is happier than say, the guy counting money inside a huge financial agency in Manhattan or Hongkong, for happiness is very relative and situational. A chinese peasant in Xiamen might be so blissful just watching the sunset slowly fall down on the horizon, but if he'd actually given idea that there's sort of things as cinemas, televisions, cars, and rollercoasters somewhere out there in Beijing, then he might not be as blissful as he should be. The saying "ignorance is bliss" should hold true this way. And it only shows, happiness is more of a state of mind than being a human trait...

[eric]

I agree with Major Tom that happiness is indeed a state of mind.

Personally, happiness to me is doing what you want, whenever you want and wherever you want -- for waking up with something to do is a blessing in and of itself.

[milkphish]

sometimes, the adage "ignorance is bliss" holds true . . . or is it "complacency is bliss" . . .

[Jon Limjap]

I think happiness is a choice. It's not really about whether one ought to be happy or not, being in his own situation. The movie La Vita Bella (Life is Beautiful) comes to mind -- the character played by Roberto Benini simply chooses to be happy, not minding about how miserable his life *actually* is.

The pitfalls of a more educated, materialistic, white collar life typical of developed countries is that life is just more complex. And a complex life full of trivialities convincing you that you must possess a certain appearance, exhibit a certain kind of lifestyle, own serveral sorts of properties, etc. to be *truly* happy just prevent these people, fortunate as they already are, to *think* that their lives are miserable in essence.

It just doesn't have to be that way.