Beyond Happiness

In accepting that life is not about happiness, it can raise some hard questions for some people. If life isn’t about being happy then why am I even alive? I’m going to die one day anyway.

The problem with this objection is that you are identifying with “you”, not your true self.

The idea that you are going to die one day in the future actually doesn’t make sense. Every moment we are a different person based on our neural activity. You are not the same person you were 10 years ago, 1 year ago, 1 month ago, or even yesterday. A version of you is dying every second.

The reason we experience happiness is because we are fulfilled at that moment - often a fleeting moment. Even for the most “successful” people, they are not happy all the time.

Feelings of happiness and fulfillment is merely our brain achieving a state of existential equilibrium. In this state, the neural networks that expresses what you are is not in conflict with each other.

For many people, rather than growing and overcoming existential dissonance, they shrink their awareness until it’s so small that there’s nothing to cause dissonance. The problem with creating a comfort bubble is that it's not sustainable. It relies on other people and external circumstances in order to provide the comfort bubble. Even if you want to provide for your own comfort bubble, you still need to leave your comfort bubble in order to make money and perform basic tasks for yourself. When out in public or interacting with friends, their mirror neurons overpower their weakened sense of self and they literally become a different person and it causes a lot of dissonance. They completely lose themselves and mirror their environment because they have not built a strong self image.

If you are obsessed with being happy you will be less happy overall than people who just let it happen naturally as a side effect of other things they’re doing that is in alignment with their true self.

Addressing the nihilistic point of view that the world is going to come to an end some day so none of it matters. When you say life has no purpose, that argument itself is self contradictory.

What does a blind person see? Black? No. A blind person sees as much as you see through your elbow. Seeing just doesn't exist. When you think of not being able to see, you compare it to seeing. Just like we compare the idea of purpose to no purpose. But from the universe's perspective purpose doesn't exist.

The idea of purpose is a man-made concept. Everything in the universe “just is.” Therefore, when asking “what is the purpose of life?” we have to use a human reference frame. And from a human perspective, the purpose of life is pretty clear. It is to survive, grow, and evolve. That is what we have been doing for billions of years. To say that life has no purpose would be to contradict life itself.

Evolving is what we're doing whether we accept it or not. Ways of life that are less in line with the objective reality will eventually die out and the ones that are more in line with the objective reality will flourish.

During the Ebola crisis, in Liberia, the biggest contributor to the disease spreading was their tradition. It's actually quite easy to stop the spread of Ebola because it doesn't spread through the air. But their tradition in Liberia of kissing the forehead of the dead during their burial ceremony is what was causing Ebola to spread so rapidly. Doctors and media were warning people to not bury people in the traditional way, their shaman and leaders accused American's of trying to trick them to take away their culture. But more and more people were dying because of Ebola.

This is a sad example, but an example nonetheless of how the objective reality will eventually autocorrect the parts of our intersubjective reality that go against it.

You can run away from your problems but you can't run away from your self. That is why aligning yourself with your true self and objective reality through understanding is a much more consistent stable paradigm.