Happines
1
Thought & creativity II 2020 - 2021
4. Happiness
Can we define happiness?
Are you happy? Is happiness a
goal? Is it a process?
Does happiness come from
within?
EPICURUS ON HAPPINESS WITH ALAIN DE BUTTON
• Pleasure as the end of life.
• Most of the time what we want is not what we need.
• We only need 3 ingredients to be happy:
- FRIENDSHIP – Friends are a major source of happiness. Not just occasionaly,
permanent companions. It is more important who you are eating with than what
you are eating
- SELF-SUFFICIENCE – not depending on any boss. Nothing to prove to anyone in
the financial aspect.
- ANALYZED LIFE – take time to take a look at our worries fInd time and space
to think about life.
• If you have an enormous wealth but you don’t have this 3 ingredients, you will never
be happy.
SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
• Quality over quantity?
• Aristotle 3 levels of friendship:
- Utilitarian – we are useful for each other.
- Pleasure – lasts while the fun lasts. (eg. drinking buddy)
- Virtue (areté): egalitarian perception of the other.
Selfless relationship. Mutual respect and admiration.
Sincere and honest joy for the achievements of the other.
Requires work.
Harvard performed an 80 years
study on happiness that concluded
that those that get to their last
days healthier and happier are
those that had been able to do a
proper selection of their social
relationships.
- Highest ratio of depression and suicide.
- Individualization. Narcissism.
- Capitalism - Happiness focused on achieving and consuming.
- Urgency – Instant gratification
- Hyperstimulation
CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
Do we know how to be
alone with our own
thoughts, without recieving
stimuli?
Timothey D. Wilson’s study
“When wealth occupies a higher position
than wisdom, when notoriety is admired
more than dignity, when success is more
important than self-respect, the culture
itself overvalues “image” and must be
regarded as narcissistic.”
Alexander Lowen
CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
• Unrealistic expectations.
• False happiness – Social Media
• Dangerous image of permanent satisfaction
• Comparison – Competition
• Narrative self vs true self
“In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(THE DANGERS OF)
POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY & SELF-HELP
“Nothing is impossible”
“You are the only one that can limit
yourself ”
“With effort you can be whatever you
want to be”
“Smile, everything is going to be
alright”
FREEDOM
A STOIC PERSPECTIVE
STOICISM
• Zenon, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius…
• What can I control? What can’t I?
• The world is a dangerous place. Be prepared
for the worst.- Premeditatio Malorum
• Autarchy. Ataraxia.
• “Amor fati”
SENECA
“Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be
sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we
should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can
happen. What is man? A vessel that the slightest shaking, the
slightest toss, will break. A body weak and fragile.“
“Observe and avoid, long before it happens, anything that is
likely to do you harm. To effect this your best assistance will
be a spirit of confidence and a mind strongly resolved to
endure all things. He who can bear Fortune can also beware
of Fortune. “
• True happiness relies only in ourselves.
• The importance of resisting social pressure.
• Sustine et abstine (Bear & forbear).
• The impermanence of things.
EPICTETUS “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to happen, but
instead want them to happen as they
do happen, and your life will go well”
“So should it be with persons; if you
kiss your child, or brother, or friend . .
. you must remind yourself that you
love a mortal, and that nothing that
you love is your very own; it is given
you for the moment, not forever nor
inseparably, but like a fig or a bunch
of grapes at the appointed season of
the year, and if you long for it in
winter you are a fool. So too if you
long for your son or your friend, when
it is not given you to have him, know
that you are longing for a fig in winter
time.”