From the very beginning of time, man has been the victim of a fundamental delusion - the blind belief that the path to happiness lies through satisfying needs, achieving goals and fulfilling dreams. This mistake cannot be attributed only to a depressing lack of discernment, since it is rooted in the very foundation of the human psyche. Moreover, this mirage is not at all accidental, it is purposefully supported by the harsh mother nature, which, in order to help the body survive in this cruel world, uses two crude but effective motivational strategies - carrot and stick, negative and positive reinforcement.
On the one hand, if we obediently fulfill our instinctive programs, nature gives us a bite of sweet gingerbread. So, to the one who wants to drink, it is pleasant to satisfy the thirst, and to the one driven by the will to money-grubbing, each new coin that falls into the piggy bank brings a little joy. On the other hand, refusal or lack of agility in the implementation of natural algorithms entails a lashing whip. The one tormented by thirst finds this feeling more and more unbearable and unbearable, and the one who strives for power, property, knowledge, love is constantly burdened by their lack. It is the feeling of lack, a painful lack that pushes him forward - this is how the rider whips the horse and plunges his spurs into its sides so that it runs faster.
Here, however, nature's tricks are just beginning. As all marketers know, carrot itself has little incentive. You need to be able not only to present it to the victim, it is important to sell it correctly - so that the saliva begins to stand out abundantly, and the eyes light up with a devilish flame. Our imagination, being an incomparable illusionist, always tries to create an exaggerated-idealized image of those sensations and changes in our life that we must experience upon realizing our own goals and achieving our cherished dreams. Corrupted by the motivational centers of the brain, it associates desire gratification with much greater amounts of pleasure and change than it can bring. Borrowing a term from historiography, this cognitive distortion can be called "range aberration."
With triple zeal, we rush forward, grab the coveted gingerbread and only have time to feel its bland, and sometimes even sour aftertaste, as new beautiful pictures pull us forward again. A person does not feel the substitution, or at least for a very short time, since he is not only incapable of reading his own program code and introspection, but also by nature itself is carefully directed in the opposite direction. He does not see that the states "before" and "after" are practically identical, and despite a hundred checkmarks already put on the list of desires and achievements, his attitude and inner experience have practically not changed for the better.
The allure of the euphoric visions generated by the brain is complemented by an even more powerful stimulus - a mechanism that continuously generates suffering, which can be called "existential dissonance" or rupture. As a painfully experienced difference between "I have" and "I want," it is not just the main source, but the only source of suffering that a person experiences. Any form of the latter, unlike physical pain, boils down to masochistic meditation on this unstoppably bleeding rift, which is more painful the more its lower boundary (“I have”) lags behind the upper one (“I want”).
Quantitative concept of happiness
The innate human conception of happiness, on which our entire civilization is based, can be called a quantitative concept. Rooted in the natural structure of man outlined above, it represents the realization of an instinctive urge to bring the lower border of the existential gap to the upper one in order to stop the hail of blows falling on us and sink our teeth into the blessings of life. Therefore, life is seen from this perspective as a series of satisfaction of needs, the pursuit of internal and external acquisitions: property, knowledge, skills, status, relationships, fame, experiences, personal qualities.
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But alas - nature is not easy to deceive, and we immediately discover that all our efforts move both bars evenly forward, keeping the distance between them unchanged or, at best, only slightly reducing it. Not understanding the mechanisms driving them, a person throws trophy after trophy into the greedy black hole of his own desire. This process, however, is doomed to a fiasco, and it does not get any easier for it - the gap remains, and each new tick in life, despite the exaggerated promises of the imagination promising euphoria, changes his sense of life to extremely small values. Hunger never leaves a person, and his own psyche, as well as the socio-cultural system, does everything to throw wood into this fire and maintain a sufficient intensity of desire.
Vaguely aware that life is leading him by the nose, however, in imitation of the card players, he tries to keep a good face in a bad game and flaunts his achievements, which bring him so little genuine joy. The satisfied and well-fed faces of celebrities, the envy-inflamed picture of their lives, as a rule, match the inner reality of their existence as little as the plastic smiles of service workers. These are Potemkin villages - empty painted facades, behind which are damp, gloomy huts with earthen floors.
The modern consumer society and the show-off consumption culture that reflects it, reaching its apogee in social networks, are structurally doomed to generate envy, anxiety, despair and unhappiness, and at the same time lies about their absence. The existential gap, stretching and maintaining it, is at the core of our economies, politics and ideology; this is the Procrustean bed on which the individual crucifies, bombarded from all sides by retouched images of wealth, happiness, success, beauty. Whoever believes that the tragedy of the situation lies in the fact that an ordinary person does not see all these bright benefits, for which he is forced to painfully strive, is still naively optimistic. No, the real tragedy lies in the fact that even the possession of all the sweet cakes in the world will not really change anything in his life, but he does not understand this as he himself,so are the rulers of this world, wrapped in the same cocoon of ancient illusions.
All a person who pursues a quantitative version of happiness can count on is to become Donald Trump, who is a beautiful symbolic embodiment of the final point that this road leads to. He achieved everything that a consumer of a society can only dream of: he acquired an unthinkable multi-billion dollar fortune and received the highest power position in the modern world. Only this, as the poet wrote, is not enough. When he reached the very top of Fuji, he found that it was cold and there was absolutely nothing to do. No more satisfied than he was at its foot, now he wants only one thing - attention and love.
If you look at Trump's interview, it is striking that he, with captivating simplicity and at the same time desperate thirst in his eyes, constantly says, like a spell: “Everyone loves me,” “I get along with everyone” (for example, an interview for Anderson Cooper, CNN). Basically, all he wants is to be hugged tightly, praised and told that's my boy. But again, the tragedy of the situation is not at all in the fact that a person went into politics to be hugged (this is just typical), and at the same time is the most ridiculed and unpopular president over the past 70 years. The problem is that even if dreams come true, if we all hug Trump together and he really believes that he is loved, it will not stop the underlying heartache and confusion.
No matter what mountain peak a person climbs, whether it is wealth, power, knowledge, popularity or beauty, the philosophy and practical experience of climbers testify that he finds there only pale shadows of what he was looking for, what his imagination and ideology that inflamed him promised him. Unravel the greatest mysteries of the universe, win three Nobel prizes, become Miss Universe or Mr. Olympia for the tenth time, make your home Oscars or gold medals - in vain. You will hardly feel differently than on one of the ordinary days at the very beginning of your path to these bright goals. And, of course, you will be left far behind in all respects by some shepherd from the Iranian plains, a monk, or anyone who approached the problem from the opposite end.
Quality concept of happiness
An individual trying to find happiness only in such a quantitative way is like the fool who decided to catch up with the horizon. Since this imaginary and infinitely receding trait is created by our own brains, we must focus on bringing the upper bar of the existential gap to the lower one, and not vice versa. This is precisely the essence of a qualitative approach to happiness, based on an understanding of the mechanism of our inner life and the cognitive distortions inherent in humans. Its goal is not to multiply the benefits at our disposal, but to transform the very system and structure of desire, our attitude and perception. There are three fundamental strategies for carrying out this operation of hacking into installed software by nature and culture.
Destruction of desires
The first, the most obvious and radically crude approach to bridging the gap was found by the pioneers of self-knowledge at least two and a half thousand years ago and took shape in Indian spiritual teachings, primarily Buddhism, as well as in the cynicism and Stoicism of Ancient Greece. Realizing that the source of suffering lies in desire, it was decided to give the desire a battle - to realize its emptiness, to limit it to the sphere of what is directly accessible and to minimize it as much as possible. Suppression of mental disturbances in Buddhism, stoic ataraxia ("dispassion") were and still are capable of brilliant results, but they have a number of obvious shortcomings. First, mastering them is a task of colossal complexity and requires specific external conditions (isolation or a community of like-minded people), outside of which the already problematic struggle with desire approaches impossibility. Secondly,suppression of needs and desires leads to the impoverishment of inner life, atrophy of creative abilities, a decrease in the diversity and completeness of human experience. An integral part of the latter is the creative discomfort and tension arising in the process of overcoming one's own limitations, finally, the necessary from time to time powerful bursts of suffering or joy.
Mastering the present
The next method is born out of the way of neutralizing the "aberration of proximity" - one of two basic cognitive distortions created by motivational centers. Consciousness that makes us believe in the images of “lost paradise” and “longed-for paradise”, exaggerating and distorting objects of desire that are distant from us in time, at the same time underestimates the meaning of what is in front of us now. A person, not knowing how to properly use what he has, strives to acquire everything new and new, so that then, like a mythical dragon, he will sit on treasures, which he still cannot find use. Happiness seems to him somewhere ahead, therefore, after one thing and at one stage of his life, he already thinks about another, in a hurry to be in that “beautiful far away”, when finally life will sparkle with bright colors.
One of the most ancient calls to cognize our present, to see and take what it has to offer us, is the famous words from the poems of Horace - carpe diem, “seize the day”. But the catchers of days of us are very bad, our eyes are too covered with mirages and carrots that fate shakes in front of our noses in order to enjoy the beauty of simple things and activities, the colors and sounds of the world around us, the life of thought, body and soul, real human contact. Like experienced miners, we must learn to extract jasper and diamonds from the ore of everyday life and to wash golden sand from the course of the day.
Freedom from desire
Debunking the second distortion, the aberration of range, provides us with the last and most valuable of the keys to happiness. Realizing how exaggerated the promises of the imagination and the actual scale of the objects it draws are distorted, we by an effort of will bring down the upper boundary of the existential gap. The embodiment of our dreams and the satisfaction of needs only slightly changes our attitude, therefore, the distance between the points "I have" and "I want", in view of their real significance, is not at all as great as it always seemed. Freedom from desires does not mean suppression or radical rejection of them, it rests on a reassessment of their value, a pure perception of their true nature, meaning and capabilities.
As we continue to strive for whatever we want, we can and must keep our distance and detachment from our own goals. How much and in what volume we will embody is so unimportant for our soberly seen life that we should not be frightened by the prospect or the fact of defeat, as well as confused by the distance separating from them. Possessing desires, instead of allowing them to spin our heads and swallow us, we acquire what seems to be the simplest and most reliable of the secrets of human existence. And although we do not need, like Buddhist monks or Stoics, to level out disturbances of the mind and minimize needs and desires, it would be wise to follow their example, even if only partially. Many of them should really be discarded, because most of the worries and cherished goals of a modern person are imposed from the outside and do not belong to him at all. Finally, having seen ourselves and our desires with a clear look, having freed ourselves from them, we must turn this unclouded gaze around and learn, according to Horace's behest, to be skillful catchers of days - they can always offer more than it seems.
© Oleg Tsendrovsky