The paradox of hedonism
This is something already known to ancient Greek philosophers. It's very simple: you don't find happiness by directly pursuing it. Happiness is only the indirect consequence of something else, the result perhaps of something we produced or created and we are satisfied with. We find happiness when we aim at something else.
We all have experienced this type of failure. If you desperately try to have fun at a party, you're more likely to end up with the opposite effect. A deliberate effort to enjoy oneself, to find happiness or pleasure with alcohol or drugs can be one extreme case of this paradox. Another extreme case, at the other end of the scale, can be psychotherapy: continuously looking for possible internal obstacles to one's happiness.
Another phenomenon that seems strange, or at least is surprising the first time one notices it, is that our mind is a bit like our reflection in a mirror. Sometimes I've spent a long, long time trying to analyze myself, in endless introspection, and the more I was attempting to understand who I was, the more elusive that goal became.
And then, when I was studying a subject outside myself, such as a political issue or a social matter, I slowly started to see better what type of person I was, what I wanted to achieve, what I considered desirable, in a word my (non-physical) shape was getting more clearly outlined and defined. I can see here an analogy with our physical image. If we want to know what we look like, we can't look at ourselves directly. Instead, we have to look at an object entirely external to us: a mirror.
Happiness and money: dispelling a myth
It may seem obvious, and yet not many people take notice of this thing, that philosophers have always said, from Epicurus onwards: finding happiness in wealth is an illusion.
In the early '80s, Americans had 5 times as many air-conditioners per head, 4 times as many clothes dryers and 7 times as many dishwashers as in 1958; 93% of American homes owned colour TVs, as opposed to 1% in 1960. Yet, despite this dramatic increase, people didn't feel happier. The University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center found that the proportion of Americans describing themselves as ""very happy" had remained the same (one third).
For most people, once they've satisfied their basic needs, the pursuit of material wealth does not achieve happiness.
That explains why the huge gulf in affluence between, say, the Germans and the Indians, or the Japanese and the Kenyans doesn't translate into a different degree of how happy the people of these countries judge themselves.
R. A Easterlin, of the University of Pennsylvania, has performed a comparative international survey of the link between affluence and happiness. His conclusion is that there is little relation between the two: "Economic growth does not rise a society to some ultimate state of plenty. Rather, the growth process itself engenders ever-growing wants that lead it ever onward".
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