Discussion on happiness

“It is very hard to be happy after you wake up in the morning, every day.”

One of my dear friends was going through a transition in her adult life, which she chose to explain like this. She firmly said the last two words of that sentence, wanting to let me know that it’s really a daily struggle. When this happened, we were sitting in my room and had nothing better to do. So, we indulged.

Being constantly happy is a hard thing to do. But what bothered her the most about it was the conscious efforts. Every day she woke up, she had all these thoughts in her head, but still, she consciously chose happiness.

It was interesting to see that she was looking at happiness as a choice, whereas the moments we feel the happiest are always the most unaware ones. Conscious Choice is the most thought-out, planned, and ‘aware’ phenomenon in our minds. In choice, we are not only aware of the options to live life but are also acting on them. It's one of the things that makes us human. This made us think about these two distinct ideas. Being happy and being aware. As we pondered over more, we saw that both are not mutually exclusive from each other and rather overlap all the time.

If being happy were a choice, one would have always chosen it, and to make that conscious choice, one would’ve to be constantly aware. But as it is impossible to be constantly aware, that choice cannot be made. Does that mean that it is not a choice? But that can’t be true because we are seldom completely unaware. Moreover, we are making choices all the time, every minute of our lives. Hence, being happy must be one of the major choices to be made.

Taking a detour in this paradoxical question, we contemplated the concept of awareness. At best, we would’ve gained some knowledge about ourselves for it to be percolated in our choices, and at worst, our friends would’ve called us boring. After all, the happiness that we would’ve gained from sounding intelligent was of the best kind.

If we look at the awareness scale, from least to most, only the extremities can give us the certainty of being happy. The least aware being is not affected by judgment, nor does it have any doubts about its actions or intentions. The acts are only morally wrong or right if they are looked at from the outside. This outside is nothing but awareness of the world. On the other hand, the most aware being exists only in imagination. Different faiths and belief systems have taken varying approaches to reach there, and the idea is indeed profound. But very few or none of us have actually reached there. Where most humans truly reside is the middle part of this scale.

This middle of the scale is annoying but fascinating at the same time. Being somewhat aware of ourselves makes us perfectly imperfect. Even in that, the scale is dynamic. We are more aware of certain aspects of our lives than others. We don’t always choose this, and sometimes we are even unaware of this categorization. It may be nature or nurture, but we have our preferred zones in life to be aware of.

Something as major as a war can affect someone deeply, considering they choose to be well-aware of the situation and empathize with the victims, but the same person can be completely blind when it comes to being aware of how their partner is feeling. Someone might be very hyper-aware at their home, sensing what every family member is feeling, but the same person can be completely blind when it comes to attention to detail at the workplace.

Whatever the reasons may be, being partially aware has made all of us a bit anxious at some point in time. Most of us have at least once felt that it would have been better if we were not so aware. For many, it also reflects in their inability to choose. Empathizing with both sides of an argument makes them indecisive. Only if they could somehow choose not to empathize with one side, it would have been much easier. Only if they could convince themselves to be deluded by the other side’s story completely, it would have been so much easier.

We are all partially aware beings. Hence, to be happy seems like a partial choice. It’s not as easy as ignoring whatever makes you unhappy and only focusing on the positive things. But neither should it be as tough as being very hard on yourself for a futile or irrelevant reason. It’s not absolute, it's very personal, and it is definitely a daily struggle.

After all this talk, I was tired, and I could tell that she was too. We realized that we had pondered the idea for a long time, and nothing had come out of it. It felt like we wanted to get out of there and just wanted to be happy. We headed out for a tea and forgot all about this discussion when we reached the chai tapri. We met our friends there and had our usual fun.

To be honest, that made me happier than the discussion on happiness.