Jack.is » Empathetic » Happiness

Think Happy; Be Happy

I wrote this for a Dallas community college academic placement exam. I drafted most of it before rereading, editing a bit, cranking out the rest, fixing a few typos, and submitting. Some unknown human evaluated it and when I submitted the rest of the exam, the paper had scored 8, the highest possible. It was a bit scary to see "8" next to numbers like 120, but they like to use funny scales to screw with you.

The assignment: Plan (lol) and write a multi-paragraph essay addressing whether our happiness is a result of conscious effort, as according to the Lincoln quote below, or an involuntary state.

Oh, and I have a copy of the essay because I realised that I'd written something decent so I opened cmd and telnetted to a shell account, stuck it in a text file, then went home and formatted it.

When Abraham Lincoln said that "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be," he was right on. Though he was not, to my knowledge, any sort of psychologist or sociologist, he understood that all we are is the result of what we have thought.

It's true that there are situations to which we can assign words such as "sad", "happy", "good", "bad", etc. It's not exactly uncertain that an auto crash is traumatic, tragic, and typically terrible; or that winning the lottery jackpot can easily be the most exhilarating moment of a person's life. Philosophical semantics aside, there are certain types of experiences which will evoke certain emotional responses. We're not accustomed to controlling our emotions to any great degree, so it seems that, regardless of how happy we choose to be, our experiences will always hold some control over how we perceive and immediately react to it.

However*, this says nothing of our constant, general outlook, or of how we handle our experiences after they're over. This is the most vital and common of states: We are not experiencing anything notable. Perhaps we have worries and anticipations. Maybe we're in an extended predicament of some sort. Whatever has been happening is irrelevant because nothing is happening now. It is in this state that we are most able to contemplate our situations and experiences, and come to see them in the best light possible.

When nothing is happening, we're free to experience, if we choose, the joy of existence. We can revel in the senses. Watch our favourite nature scene. Listen to the music. Dance to the music. Feel the breeze, the warmth, the cold, the rain. Detect the distinct scent of an impending storm. Look up to the weeping clouds. Share a tear with the sky.

Even when enaged in activity and experience, being the efficient multitasking machines that we are, we can try to maintain happiness and adapt our surroundings and experiences to that end. Determined happiness is a constant effort and, it seems, a conscious decision. When times are hard, it will not do to dwell on that fact. Instead, we must understand that this, too, will pass, and bearing this in mind we can maintain hope within ourselves and extend it to others. When the little things, the insignificant but invaluable tokens of compassion and community, are all we have, we must appreciate them all the more.

While we can blame many of our emotions on the chemistry of the brain, we can manipulate ourselves beyond or despite them. Laughter has been shown, in scientific studies conducted by serious people who don't smile too much and mean business, to be the best medicine, at least excepting the real medicines. The placebo effect shows what great influence we can have over our health and healing if we simply think that the placebo will have the desired effect. Terminal cancer patients have recovered, having turned to psychological and spiritual therapy after physical medicine failed.

In any case, all of this philosophy, wordplay, medical psychology, and existential joy is objectively meaningless. It's up to each of us as individuals to be aware of what emotions we experience and to analyse them. In doing so, we can deconstruct our experiences and determine what in them makes us feel certain emotions. We cannot often alter our unpredictable and flowing experience of life, but we can alter our unthinking reactions to it which, together, can be the difference between pessimism and optimism.

I don't know about you, but all it takes for me to be content is to realise that I'd rather exist than not.

*If you fault me for using "however" at the beginning of a sentence, you are a shameless pedant and I don't like you anymore.

[Yes, I wrote that.]

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