One of the things that is pushed into our heads from a very young age is to become unhappy when we are in a situation, or see a situation, that we don’t like.
Later in life we will increasingly be told almost all situations are ones we don’t like and so we spend the majority of our time being unhappy … but it doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s an odd thing when you think about it. You are doing a job that you don’t like. Therefore, you think, you should become unhappy. Then you should try and change your job.
Or you live in a town you don’t like. You think this has to make you unhappy until you move town.
So
– Step One: You identify something you don’t like
– Step Two: You become unhappy about it
– Step Three: If possible you change that something to stop your unhappiness.
Where did Step Two creep in? There is absolutely no reason for it to be there. If you have identified something that you don’t like and you have the power to change it, or to work towards changing it then just do that. Why be unhappy along the route?
But it’s the way we were bought up and so the way society thinks as a whole. There’s almost an inbuilt assumption that we wouldn’t be able to find the energy or the intelligence to change something unless we first became unhappy. But when you stop and view the steps in black and white you can see that there isn’t a need for that assumption.
Worse still society works very hard to tell us that we shouldn’t like things, especially about our own life. We should not be satisfied with our job unless we are moving up the career ladder, our level of wealth is insufficient and we should focus on earning more in order to buy more things, and so on.
In fact if you watch the ever revolving doorway of advertisements that we are bombarded with they are a constant message of how unsatisfied we should be … and so how unhappy we should be.
Now I don’t see any issue with wanting to advance a career or earn more if you feel it is necessary or move to a different city or country of you think you might feel more at home there. But what I also don’t see is why you should be unhappy until you achieve those things. Just work towards them when you can and in the meantime … be happy.
Its difficult though isn’t it? Everyone around you has the same hard wired programming so that if you are happy a lot of the time others will begin to assume you don’t want to change anything. In fact they can get quite caught by surprise when you do. “Oh”, they say after you change jobs. “But I thought you were happy at your old company”.
Or before the move when they don’t know you are actively applying for other jobs but remain happy, “Don’t you care about your career?”. You see being unhappy shows you care … according to society … but of course that’s also a crazy connection. Why can’t you care without having to be unhappy?
Well of course you can and by doing so your care can be a great deal more focused and effective because your judgement is no longer being clouded by emotion. Isn’t that a crazy thing? Most people, in attempting to care about something, do things which are less effective than they have could be.
In fact it is the people who get unhappy in order to care that so often make the situation worse. They give money to charities which trample into Africa, build houses and a well for a village before disappearing into the horizon feeling good about themselves. Meanwhile the village structure and rhythms are upended causing social strife and a life much worse for the local population than it was before.
The “caring, unhappy” people have a sense of urgency. That village must get a well now … those poor people … we have to help! But who are they really helping? Themselves. They are acting quickly because they want to remove their own feelings of unhappiness. Ironically they are being selfish although they may not even recognise it as such, they confuse it with “caring”.
On the flip side the person who does not get unhappy about the village with no well has no urgency to make changes – their happiness is not being blocked by the situation. They can talk with the villagers and others in the area familiar with local lifestyles and customs. They can gain a clearer understanding of what would work and why and what is totally unnecessary. When it comes to implementing change (or perhaps not implementing any change) it is done so not because the person wants to feel happy, but because they believe it is the right thing to do.
Can we really be happy and care?
Yes, you can easily prove it to yourself. In general you are probably unhappy with a large number of things in your life but within the last year you have probably had moments of extreme happiness. It might have been during time spent with family and friends, during a walk in the countryside, when you watched a comedy.
All the things that made you unhappy continued to be there but you were happy. Then you reminded yourself of those things and reverted to being unhappy again!
Why do we do this to ourselves?
I think at the base point of modern society this idea about unhappiness is required to drive consumerism. For many of us we are where our grandfathers and great grandfathers hoped we would be. Housed, fed, safe, with some leisure time and hot water in the tap so it would seem, logically, the next thing to do is to organize things so that everyone else who isn’t there can catch up.
But instead we turn our attention to a bigger house, more expensive leisure time and a larger number of hot water taps! Something in the back of our mind is telling us constantly that what we have is never enough.
Yes we might give some money to others but generally to relieve guilt. Our main focus is on the idea that if we had more we would be happier.
To me the primary culprit is consumerism. Our advertisements are filled with people who look very happy because they have purchased this or that or achieved this or that. Their aim is to make us unhappy because we don’t have the this or the that they want to sell us.
Key to this is making us feel dissatisfied with our status. More people will like us if we had those things or did those things and so we decide that we don’t like our current status and therefore move straight to step 2 …. being unhappy.
One of the greatest problems this presents (apart from keeping the great majority of people unhappy) is that it also creates a completely different pool of unhappy people – those who do buy those things or do those things and then realise they did not make them happy.
I heard a good story recently (funnily enough in a “sort out your life” advert) about someone who had become a multi-millionaire at the age of 25. He had done all the things he had been told would make him happy like buy a Ferrari and drive it around town where he was then the center of attention and he enjoyed himself for a while.
But then one day he pulled up at some traffic lights in his sports car and looked around expecting to see the usual faces looking enviously back at him. Instead they were looking at something else and smiling – it was the car next to his.
In that very average family saloon was a very average family of four but with a young dog who was doing all sorts of funny things that was making them all laugh. That happiness had caught the eyes of people around the junction who were now smiling at the dog and the happy situation.
Our young guy in his Ferrari realized he was extremely wealthy in one sense but completely broke in another. In that moment he had everything the material world wanted to throw at him … but he realized he was still unhappy.
Progress versus unhappiness
Now as humans we have worked towards progressing our lifestyles for at least a thousand years. If we hadn’t we would not have invented modern housing, central heating and the myriad of other little things which all go to make up a comfortable life.
But did previous generations spend their entire lives unhappy because they hadn’t got there yet? I don’t think so. Perhaps they’re expectations were just lower as research seems to have pointed out in some situations (like for those who lived after the Second World War life improved far beyond their expectations while for the current generation life is coming in below what they had hoped for).
So expectations do play a key role and again this loops back to consumerism which is no longer able to grow by selling you what you need and so therefore has to up your expectations so you buy what you want as well.
As someone noted during the Covid Shutdowns – “Isn’t it amazing that the economy is collapsing just because we are only buying what we need”.
Shaking off unhappiness
I really like two steps that Anthony De Mello states when considering anything that starts to make you unhappy.
STEP ONE: Identify that negative feeling. In other words what is it about the situation which is making you unhappy. Is it a fear of what other people think of you or what they might think of you? When you dig around it almost always is fear and it almost always is connected to what you think other people think about you.
For example someone asks you what car you have. You tell them and they announce that this is one of the worst cars you can buy. Now you’re already getting angry so stop and identify that negative feeling. Why would you be getting angry? OK, because he has basically said you don’t have good judgement. Well let’s just accept that is possible. It might not be true in this situation but its possible.
Your ego is going wild now. If you have poor judgement then what are other people going to think of you? You must defend yourself so others do not see this! But you can let your ego fume for a while and ask the person why it is such a bad car. He says its because it has no power and only has a top speed of blah-blah-blah.
Ah! So its a terrible car on his yard stick which is about power and speed. Your yard stick was about good economy and being easy to drive around the town. So you do still have good judgement for your needs and your ego can go off and calm down somewhere.
STEP TWO: Recognise the negative feeling is in you. The person who criticised your car didn’t get angry, you did.
When you don’t like a situation or a person it is you who doesn’t like it and becomes unhappy, not the situation or that person. When you realise that whatever it is that is going on or whoever is causing you to feel negative is not “bad”, that it or they are “bad” only because you have decided so. Then you make a huge step forward.
Then you can drop the negative feeling because you know where it comes from and that it is you that is creating it.
Again, and I find myself repeating this time after time, that doesn’t mean that you go straight into a Zen state and accept everything. No, you can move to change things. What you will find though is that a huge number of things and people that you thought you wanted to change are actually perfectly all right.
Before you wanted him to change this way and her to be more like that and this town to be a little like something else. You were sitting around wanting everything to change to fit you. When you realise that these negative feelings are you and mostly based on irrational fears – more often than not about what people think about you – you stop wanting them to change and you find they are perfectly acceptable.
That leaves you with a lot more energy and a lot more time. You can identify some preferences. You might still decide you want to move to a different town but you are no longer unhappy until you do so and it will not make you unhappy if events stop that move taking place.
You also do not place responsibility for future happiness on that town, you move for rational preferences like it having better sports facilities that you would enjoy or because of a job you would like to try.
If you think that town will make you happier than this one it is only because you created a fantasy world in your mind. A fantasy life where people behave the way you want them to, where the world changes for you. There is no guarantee that fantasy world exists.
And so you set yourself up for a fall. You set yourself up for the possibility that the town will not meet its responsibility of making you happy. In fact when the time comes to move people often start to feel nervous because they know their fantasy world is about to meet reality.
But if you stopped making happiness conditional on things or events. If you just skip the unhappiness step you can be happy right now. When the time comes to move you won’t be nervous because you are not carrying expectations.
Your happiness is no longer held hostage by your mind because you dropped the unhappiness step.