Upping the Downside

Feel-Good Happiness and Value-Based Happiness

You want to be happy. But do you know which kind of happiness you want?

Many persons have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. - Helen Keller

Feel-good happiness is based on the sensations of pleasure and is generally short-term in nature. Value-based happiness is based on living a life of meaning, fulfilling a larger purpose and is long-term in nature.

Feel-good happiness is often limited by many factors: time, wealth, fitness, environment, etc. With feel-good happiness I am seeking sensations of pleasure. What if gambling gives me pleasure? Yachting? Racing cars? Traveling around the world? These things all require certain resources and capabilities which I may or may not have. In addition, some of these short-term pleasures may affect me negatively in the long-term.

Value-based happiness is a different. It is available to everyone regardless of resources and capabilities. It is the result of pursuing ends that are in alignment with our self-recognized purpose and our core desires. And it endures over time, even through hardship.

So to be happy long-term, we need to discover and follow our own self-recognized purpose. How? Start by considering two simple questions:

1. Who am I?
2. How shall I live?

Look Well Into Thyself

Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look there. -- Marcus Aurelius

What leads to a happy life?

Money certainly helps us avoid pain but although buying power has risen over the years, happiness remains about the same.

Education makes more opportunities available to us but there is actually an inverse relationship between education and measures of satisfaction.

What about overcoming our weaknesses? Learning to work harder, learning to have more willpower, improving our shortcomings, trying to bring our weak points on level with our strong points.

Much of the Self-help industry operates under a flaw. It assumes you are a blank slate, that nurture triumphs nature, that we are all on equal footing genetically and that any one of us can be anything we want to be if we simply learn to overcome our conditioned weaknesses.

I want you to consider that this belief that we can be anything we want---that only our weaknesses and lack of will power hold us back--- actually lowers our level of happiness. And that this denial of the self is an impediment to resilience.

Do we as people need to be fixed as the self-help industry would have us believe? Or do we just need to get to know ourselves better so we can make better, more congruent choices? Which path leads to better resilience?