Fixing Happiness — Happily ever after, and why you are not.
By: Axel Hansers
Tags: Philosophy, Happiness, Life Lessons, Stoicism

I want to write about some reasons as to why we are unhappy most of the time and why we will stay that way, and what you can do given that fact.

To put it bluntly, it is quite simple on the base level: You will never live happily ever after because you are an animal, and an animal brain — such as yours, simply lack the hardware to run the software you are asking for.

Happiness, as I have written about a bit before, is something we get to every once and a while, but doing so is most of the time more luck than a result of striving. Sure, we might be able to be happier in the future, you know, when we have invented nanobots that can hack and tweak our system to create an endless source of new serotonin, dopamine, and the other feel-good neurotransmitters; or when we just get a better understanding of our biochemical makeup and are able to inject some precursors to these neurotransmitters so we have an endless amount in a more natural way. But based on my knowledge of neuroscience and our bodies at large, it won’t be that simple, at all; Darwin, God, and the rest of the gang that invented evolution and our biology made sure to make it all complicated as fuck, and they also made sure to hardcode homeostasis into every last detail — So if you tinker with one thing, the rest usually goes haywire at first and resets after a while, if you are lucky, or if unlucky we might just get stuck with the haywire. For now you, therefore, have to accept that any sense of permanent happiness is not achievable based on our neurology.

But for those that feel like only talking about the brain is a bit reductionistic, as I do, let’s zoom out a bit and look at one simple fact that makes happiness a pipedream when trying to find it in more psychological terrain as well: You will never be happily ever after because you have associated happiness with stupid ass things. You think that you will be happy if you were to go on a holiday to the Bahamas, have a room with a perfect pool, a photo model partner, and a perfect sangria, or whatever those nice drinks are called. The reason you believe this is because a lot of people make money out of these believes, and they do so because they, in turn, think that making money in order to buy these same things will make them happier — and around the donkey goes. But getting these things and experiences is not the solution as things and experiences do not make you happy, a ton of people that have tried the path this will attest to. Sure, they might for a while, and I for one would say that experiences are a heck of a lot better than things, but the happiness they bring about still fade, and if you do not believe this, please go get that money, go there and come back to continue to read some more afterward.

For those that stayed, let us continue to zoom out even one step further, from psychology to sociology to look at the interpersonal aspect of why happiness is not a feasible state to chase: You will never be happily ever after because we are in the majority of the time happy in relation to others. While this might sound all well and good, people that are chasing happiness through a bigger house, paycheck or car will most likely always run into people with bigger and better versions of these things as well, and as the rule dictates, you will not be happy unless you have the best and the biggest. Once again, kind of the same situation as before, more struggle, but no more happiness.

At the most zoomed-out view, lasting happiness is naive is because of the structure of our cosmos: You will never be happily ever after because you forgot to account for the fact that your happiness goals are predicated on static things and events while the reality is occurring in an ever-changing world. See, you might seem to have it all, and then just as you were about to cross the finish line and enter into that eternal happy bliss, your trip gets canceled by new flight restrictions, she or he breaks up, your crypto savings plummet or someone dies. These things happen, all the time - and they usually mess up that happiness big time when they do.

To sum it up, long-term happiness is a sales trick and a mythological state of fairytales, but it is NOT a reasonable aim for any rational person.

Instead of aiming to be happy, you should aim to be contempt with what you have, you should aim to be resourceful in order to be at least somewhat able to handle whatever the world throws at you, and you should aim to be helpful in the longterm to everyone around you.

There is likely a whole lot of other things that are also worth aiming for, but if you start out with these three, as they are some of the most important, I assure you that things will get a whole lot better — and as a bonus, you will most likely end up feeling a little less shitty after doing so as well.