The expectation of this age is catching up fast with all of us. It is no longer enough to sit quietly in a corner, be content or even be merely satisfied. Instead, we are expected to be happy, just like all our neighbours who are enrolled in various body- and mind-cleaning aerobics. Anything less than being in a state of happiness has become an individual failure. Just as anything less than sparkling white teeth is a sign of dental disease.
Never before in the history of humankind have people sought mass happiness just because the larger society has become obsessed with it. For long, philosophers had understood something about happiness that is worth reflecting upon. What distinguishes the state of happiness from states such as joy, contentment, pleasure and satisfaction? All these states arise in us as a response to some kind of fulfilment, either having done a job well or having succeeded in our goals or even having bought the latest model of a mobile phone. But happiness is not that which arises from the successful completion of any goal or satisfaction of any desire. It should be content-less and arise from disinterested action. However, this would negate the legitimacy of seeking happiness, because in seeking it, we are acting from desire.
We have been told enough times that desire is the root cause of sorrow. Fulfilment of a desire cannot therefore lead to happiness, it can only lead to more sorrow. What seems to be a state of happiness at the fulfilment of a desire is only illusory. Reaching the pinnacle is not a happy state to be in for there is only emptiness now in front of you.
Herein lies the paradox. Desire is the root cause of sorrow but desire is also the root cause of action. How do we counter the paralysis of action when there is no desire to motivate us? If happiness is associated with disinterestedness, then how is it different from a zombie state?
These issues are connected to a more troubling observation that human creativity arises from the ashes of human suffering, both individual and social. The inspiration to reflect on the world and on our human nature arises not in moments of bliss but in moments of angst and suffering whether the suffering is physical, intellectual or even spiritual.
The very engagement with the world and society places us in the midst of desire and suffering. Knowing this, we can respond in two ways. We can remove ourselves from the world or the other option is to immerse ourselves in the dictates of the world. It is this terrible dilemma that we face because removing ourselves from the world is to remove the essential spirit of being human. Immersing ourselves in the world is a possibility that has no happiness in its horizon.
The reason for this is simple. Happiness can arise only in emptiness, when we look inward at ourselves and not outward. The only possible state of happiness is being happy with what you are. And this is the root of the problem, because it is impossible to be happy with what we are. We don’t need the existentialists to tell us this.
The sad truth is that we do not know how to live with ourselves. We are intrinsically social beings. We measure our lives according to other people’s expectations. We are constructed beings, moulded, kneaded and baked by the world around us. And most importantly, we just don’t know what we would do if we didn’t have the blueprint for living supplied by the larger society around us. Now, even the search for happiness has become part of social expectation.
Levi-Strauss, the influential French anthropologist, suggested that human thought is composed of binaries. Instead of studying tribals in Brazil, he should have lingered on in India, for here he would have encountered what is arguably the most influential binary of Indian thought—the binary of happiness (sukha) and pain (dukha). This is the mother of all binaries, of all tricky rhyming twosomes like Ram and Shyam, Sita aur Gita.
But in today’s age, happiness and pain cannot be opposites because pain is happiness. What I am suggesting here is that it is psychologically impossible for us to be in a state of happiness. Happiness is a state which is self-erasing. Once we think we have reached it, we find ways to be miserable again. We derive energy, the very energy that sustains our life, from suffering and the hope that we can come out of it. Happiness is not energising in this sense. In this simple insight, we have the seeds of a great truth. In misery lies happiness and in happiness lies existential pain.
(Sundar Sarukkai is a philosopher at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.)
