Dr P. R. Datta
What is real happiness, and what leads us to live in this world? A Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book entitled Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience in 1990 raised a salient question about what makes life worth living and what leads to happiness. He discussed the nature of flow- a physical and mental state when an individual becomes oblivious of the universe as the person is fully engaged and focused on the job at hand. According to Csikszentmihalyi, there is a time when individuals feel a sense of ownership, peace in mind, a sense of euphoria or delight, and become unaware about the whole universe that is an optimal experience. The time we feel happy, we all cherished it for a long-a moment of joy and relaxation.
Pleasure and happiness are not the same -one is depending on the external conditions and while the other derived from an internal state of mind. Only a peaceful, calm and purified mind is the source of true happiness free from any extreme desires and external materialistic forces. The world is with many destructions and millions of influencing factors. The current world we are living in is the most chaotic and full of worldly desires. It is impossible to attain peace and harmony in such a situation unless a person can conceive all desires like rivers enter into ocean and ocean is still ready to absorb more without having any problems and losing its dynamism. An oceanic consciousness of realisation is essential to become happier. However, there is a degree of happiness. Not everyone in the world wants to feel more comfortable somehow; some are truly happy, while others are wrongfully happy.
Are we really happy? Everyone in the world would like to be happy and live a peaceful life. When I reflect on my childhood, I feel a sense of joy. My childhood was full of rejoicing, peace, excitement, and happiness. I enjoyed every moment, despite living in poverty. There was a massive gap between now and then. Now, we live in a digital era with all technological advancement. With expanded middle-class families and the pace of globalisation, we have experienced enormous economic growth and development that rapidly changed our lifestyle and living ways. The rural life was very different from what we are experiencing in urban or peri-urban life, although life was tough in Bangladesh’s rural areas in the 1960s or 1970s. People mostly depended on agriculture and associated activities. However, in the quest for better education, employment, healthcare prospects, there has been a rapid move from villages to major cities and towns that looks set to continue. Even peri-urban communities are fast being swallowed up into urban conurbations of cities such as Dhaka, Chittagong, Cumilla and other major cities.
Cities afford regular employment in manufacturing, especially in the garment industry and various manufacturing concerns; the whole economy progressed well over the past two decades. Bangladesh is now a developing country, and very soon, it will be one of the top 25 major economies in the world. While we all cherish our cultural traditions, we had to adapt and change to a more interconnected world that offers more opportunities, more income and wealth, a path to worldly success for many. We learn how to live a life with a promising future at the cost of our emotions, feelings, peace and harmony. We become more pleasure-oriented day by day. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case for the entire world, in which profit maximisation is the norm and ethos of society.
Eudaimonia is a Greek word, and Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle used the word Eudaimonia to emphasise the true meaning of happiness. According to Aristotle-Eudaimonia is a process, and happiness is one of the most choice-worthy activities, and this should be seen as the outcome of the actions. Achieving the best conditions for a human being is the primary purpose of Eudaimonia in Greek Philosophy: happiness plus meaningful life that includes morality, virtue, principles, dignity and ethics. How can we become better people? How can we fulfil our unique potential? These are the fundamental underlying principles of the concept. To achieve such Eudemonic happiness, we all need to work hard, cultivate our virtue, accept the current circumstances, and balance our actions with the right wisdom. In Eudemonic terms, as a genuine individual and moral citizen in society, we all must excel at focusing our moral strengths such as doctors should excel at healing patients, Government should excel at serving the people, civil servants should excel at providing better services to the service receivers.
In eudaimonia, happiness is not about the things we own; it is not all about pleasure, status, or anxiety to become something we all aspire to; it is all about how we live our lives irrespective of our circumstances, being satisfied with the current situations and avoiding anxieties about what is not yet achieved. Pleasure or utility all are monistic concepts; eudaimonia is the opposite of it.
The ancient Greek philosophers and philosophy such as Aristotle, Plato and others have viewed happiness (attainment of eudemonia) is the ultimate goals of human life, and ethics is the cultivation of wisdom. Therefore, it is an essential precondition for happiness that human possesses an ethical and morally responsible lifestyle. In contrast, Epicurus (Greek philosopher) viewed happiness, not as a matter of virtue instead as pleasure as he saw such happiness aimed at anxiety-free life that comes through the full enjoyment of pleasure and pain avoidance. Epicurus viewed happiness as interlinked with joy as everyone pursues pleasure for their shake as the highest good. Based on personal observations, Epicurus concluded that a pleasure-seeking attitude is the norm of humankind and starts from our child age when we are born, and we always try to avoid pain. Pain is viewed as the greatest evil, while pleasure is the blessings and highest good. Freedom from anxiety and pain is the way to measure the relative merits of other activities of life (Epicurus). The most enjoyable activities are produced great pleasure and make us free from pain and anxieties, and hence these pleasures are most conducive to our inner peace of mind. Therefore, Epicurean Happiness is freedom from pain and stress that leads to great human pleasure or tranquillity. Epicurus considered pleasure the most important intrinsic value and far from stereotypical one based on a simple desire to attain an inner tranquillity than complicated or unnecessary desires. His view is well connected to the idea of Schumpeter – Simplicity is the best.
Epicurus believed that external stimulus has little or no influence on happiness. Individual happiness is not conditioned by wealth, marriage, or winning a lottery; or good looking. These are not permanent. For him, the greatest secret of happiness is being independent of external things and being content with the simplest things that always ensure or remove disappointment. This smallness is well connected to another great thinker- Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, a German statistician & Economist, known for his book “Small is Beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered” published in 1973. He was against the creation of giant organisations. He denounced the doctrine of technological, economic and scientific specialisation and proposed a system of intermediate technology based on smaller working units; ownership should be communal with regional workplaces that utilise local resources and labour forces. He realised the danger of big corporations and the future hegemonic world order. Extreme pleasure will increase pain when someone loses it; it may increase anxiety or anxiety to obtain such pleasure or even increase further desire to achieve something more and more incredible pain, stress, and disappointment.
In the current materialistic and globalised world, the concept of happiness has a very much subjective and relative meaning. It is an emotional state of personal well-being conditioned by positive emotional feeling leading to pleasure and joy. The ways we all are living in this world, it is not possible to attain pure happiness. Our life is full of desires, false aspirations, goals with worldly things that create infinite tensions, anxieties and unethical activities and results from attaining temporary pleasure. Pure happiness that is truthful, compassionate and without having any unnecessary craving for complex desire and doing the right and simple thing with positivity to bring inner peace. To attain this, individual need to practice and create a habit to focus on simple things to achieve joy. As it is not linked to complex desire and goals, it is challenging to practice initially, but it is more enjoyable over time. Therefore, the appropriate disciple is essential to attain this happiness.
Real happiness that is long-lasting and genuine always looks poisonous initially, but nectar type happiness in the end. Schumpeter’s creative destruction concept is that creativity, innovation, and real inner happiness come through natural destructions, pain, and problems. We must have that courage to face such agony, pain and unhappiness to achieve real happiness. But are we ready to face that pain and problems? Can we be more morally ethical? Can we live a simple but pleasant life based on socially responsible acts, ethics, principles and not based on any false expectations, unexpected desires and falsifications? The end goal is happiness with the simple joy
The Writer is Executive Chair, Centre for Business & Economic Research, UK
