How To Be Happy Part 5: The Paradoxical Road

This is the last part of the 5 part series on Happiness.

Maybe this seemed a bit out of left field for an account primarily focused on health and fitness, but I’d argue that it’s perfectly in line.

At the end of the day, we want to be happy.

Happiness has become a convoluted term that means different things to different people. It’s often mistakenly confused for pleasure.

But in some overarching sense, we’re all striving for happiness.

We’re all playing our own games to get there, and happiness looks slightly different for each of us, but happiness — however one might uniquely define it — is the ultimate goal.

I’ve used this series over the past few weeks to try and parse together a coherent idea of happiness based on several books I’ve read recently.

• Awareness by Anthony DeMello

• On The Happy Life (from Seneca’s Letters)

• The Meaning of Happiness by Alan Watts

• The Tao Te Ching

• The Bhagavad Gita

Hopefully, someone has found this series somewhat interesting — it’s at least helped me clarify some of my thinking on the topic (this is what writing is for, after all).

This series has gone over:

1. The Desire Trap - how viewing things as preferences rather than desires (contracts you make to be unhappy until you’ve fulfilled the urge) is a healthier way to approach goals and drives

2. Avoiding cognitive dissonance through “Via-negative authenticity” — how happiness and authenticity are invisible, and what stands out more clearly are the reverse states. The best way to be authentic is to avoid the sting of inauthenticity, and this is easier to define than authenticity.

3. That your best work and best results will come from immersing yourself in your craft and the process — when you are the archer who shoots for the “prize of gold,” you get in your head and don’t perform well.

4. Selfless Service - the message we see in virtually all ancient spiritual texts tells us that the highest form of living is to live in service to a cause greater than yourself. This is the way to happiness and your best results.

And to wrap it up, I’ll be exploring the weird way that Westerners need to achieve happiness: the paradoxical road.

The biggest issue with happiness is apparent even in my describing this series.

To say that happiness is something we’re striving for goes directly against what mystics and spiritual leaders have been yelling at us for centuries.

You don’t need anything to be happy. Happiness is your default state.

It’s available to you now.

Right. Fucking. Now.

But we Westerners have a tough time with this.

The Pursuit of Happiness isn’t just a Will Smith movie.

It’s a phrase from the Declaration of Independence:

…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That happiness is something to be pursued is baked into the ethos of Western consciousness.

But this doesn’t vibe with the message from most Eastern Philosophy and even The Bible.

This is the conflict of happiness that we experience in The West.

Our values are shaped by taking initiative, being active in the world, and self-actualizing.

The idea that we don’t need to do anything to be happy doesn’t fit in well with our narrative.

In “The Meaning of Happiness,” Alan Watts directly addresses happiness for Westerners and discusses how it necessarily needs to be a different approach from the oriental tradition.

For us (Western people), it’s not good enough to be told that happiness is available to us right now and doesn’t depend on external conditions.

To discover this, we need to try.

We need to pursue happiness in order to discover that it can’t be pursued.

The analogy Watts uses in “The Meaning of Happiness” is the Biblical story of “The Prodigal Son.”

The Parable of The Prodigal Son

A farmer has two sons.

He divides his estate into two and gives each of them their portion of the inheritance before his death.

The older son spends his life on the farm, diligently helping his father with the work.

But the younger son, after receiving his inheritance, travels the country and indulges in all sorts of debauchery, basically behaving like a Biblical Dan Bilzerian.

But then famine strikes the country where the younger son has been drinking and hanging in brothels.

He comes back to his father’s farm, broke and embarrassed.

Instead of being angry, the father welcomes him back with open arms and arranges a celebration dinner for his return.

Western people are the Prodigal Son.

We don’t believe it’s good enough on the farm; we need to go out and explore.

We need to pursue happiness (hopefully in better ways than drinking and banging prostitutes).

Wealth is a good example of this:

How often have you heard a wealthy person say that money doesn’t provide happiness?

But just hearing this isn’t good enough.

The only way to experience this would be to truly become rich, then you’d know.

Before that, you can only just echo what wealthy people have said.

You don’t know that money doesn’t buy happiness unless you have a lot of money.

It’s the same way for happiness.

Happiness is available to us right now, independent of any external conditions.

It is our default state.

There is no “road to happiness” — we don’t have to go anywhere or even do anything to attain it.

But we can’t simply accept this.

We need to try. We need to pursue happiness.

So we embark down the “road of happiness,” exploring different techniques to get there.

But ultimately, the quest for happiness leads you back to the farm.

After enough striving, it finally hits you that happiness doesn’t depend on external factors and is your default state.

The road doesn’t really exist.

But the only way to learn that happiness can’t be pursued is to pursue happiness.

You go down a road in order to learn that the road doesn’t exist.

This is the “paradoxical road of happiness.”

I don’t believe the best way for Westerners to achieve happiness is by staying on the farm. We’re wired to be the Prodigal Son.

We need to go out and live actively in the World.

We need to self-actualize.

We need to pursue happiness.

It’s only through these endeavors that you can truly learn for yourself that happiness is your default state.

It’s not good enough to hear it.

You need to know it and see it for yourself in your own life.

So go out and live.

Pursue goals; just try to frame them as preferences and not desires.

Chase your potential.

Go self-actualize yourself in a meaningful way against your signature strengths.

Immerse yourself in your work.

Act in service of something greater than yourself.

And if you do all of this, you may just get a glimpse of what the mystics have been saying for centuries:

That happiness was available to you the whole time, and you didn’t have to do anything to attain it.

But the only way to have the realization will be to try.

The only way to learn that the road doesn’t exist is to travel the road.