Unhapiness and Its Cause
People or events do not cause unhappiness. This idea may seem counterintuitive at first because all our lives we have heard the opposite. However, upon further reflection it is clear that it is impossible for these things to cause unhappiness. It is rather our thoughts about persons and events that cause unhappiness, and we have ultimate control over our own thoughts. The events themselves are neutral.
When we were young children, we saw people react negatively to certain types of situations. We began to mirror and emulate people’s behavior. Innocently we learned to associate certain situations with certain emotions. For instance, when a person died we made ourselves feel sad, when people ignored us we felt slighted, when people lied to us we got upset, and when people stole from us we got angry. Think for a moment, is there a law that compels us to feel this way in these situations? We feel these feelings because we have been enculturated. In Mexican culture a person’s death while sad is also greeted with thought’s of love and respect for one’s ancestors. People celebrate the continuance of life, family relationships, community and solidarity. This treatment allows people to talk about death and even find humor in death. These are all positive concepts. A partial demonstration of these values is the Mexican Day of the Dead or El Dia de los Muertos.
For an event to literally cause us unhappiness a bizarre thing would have to occur; the inherently negative event would have to reach out and enter our brain. Then the event would have to stimulate our brain’s negative emotion areas thereby making us feel negative emotions – even against our will. The event would also feel negative forever; there would not be a chance to re-frame the event as a positive one in the future.
The fact is that every event has positive and negative aspects. We can recognize the reality of the negative aspects and then emphasize the positive aspects. Our happiness is under our control at all times, no matter what people we meet or events that affect us.
June 18th, 2010 at 4:00 am
In my understanding happiness is that happiness is sort of a creative act of the imagination and it is possible then to delude ourselves into to being happy in a subjective way. Perhaps delusional happiness is an okay thing if the person is not at all aware. So then his/her private world would seem well with them even when others would never want to be in their shoes. If the person is able to see into a more objective happiness they would have to have a bigger measuring rod of positive to negative feelings. The person who is delusional may only really be experiencing a very low level of positive feeling and account a high level of happiness for a low level. So in reality, even subjective reality this person may actually be minimally happy. In order to be happy a person really need a lot of experience in all possible ways that person can discover in the world. Sometimes if that person is ignorant then they would benefit a lot from admitting the great possibility that at least they are ignorant about a great many things concerning the joys in life. To not only admit that you don’t know much is good, but to be curious and active in finding more about what’s out there is likely to result in a change in a persons subjective and objective happiness. Objective is what others observe. If a person is thought of as happy than more people will want to be their friends, which will magnify that subjective happiness unless that person has some social problems of liking others. So why do people like others? Most people say like attracts like as the main reason. But happiness in it’s most simple forms is universal in its desirability to most people. The most simple form of happiness is when the happiness is caused by universally enjoyable situations and activities known to create warm fuzzy feelings; such as dancing, food, good beverages, good appearances, humor, creativity, and generally an enthusiastic mindset. At which point a community can develop and a tribe which is where we all originally came from anyway.
June 18th, 2010 at 4:03 am
I forgot to mention music!