Happiness

Somehow, I really don't like the conclusion of my last post. I never thought of fate that way and it sortaa just popped out in my mind. But right now, for lack of better explanation or understanding about consciousness I'll put that idea on hold for a while..

What is consciousness? How important are we in this universe? What is so special about the earth? What is so special about us? Or is there anything special at all? So many questions and not many answers I guess..

Sometimes it appears so silly and foolish to go through all these trappings of modern life. All through the ages, people have been doing the same things more or less.. when it comes down to the basics, nothing much has changed really. We are faced with the same sort of problems faced by the first humans i guess.. just the scale is different! Even with all the advances in science and technology, supposedly meant to save a lot of human labor and time, we are still working all day and perhaps, we have even less of a time compared to our ancestors. Perhaps the difference is that our ancestors might have been happy for so many things, that we take for granted and no longer derive any pleasure from them. Now, we want more or rather different things that the earlier ones had no knowledge of.

In such a case, if our aim is to make this planet a nice place for everyone, are we any closer to achieve that goal than the earlier ones? At any given place, over a period of time, I would imagine there is happiness and there is misery, in roughly the same proportions. Happiness is more a state of mind than anything else.. which can be influenced by the surrounding material world, but not just that.

When a person living in a small hut suddenly acquires a palace, he will be elated and happy, but not for too long when the palace becomes granted for him and he'll soon be worried about other issues.. as worried as he was, when he was in the small hut. Eventually, he craves for other things, things which he doesn't have..

Now imagine a world in which we could get anything we wanted. Will that assure us happiness? I am not so sure. I would imagine, we would eventually get bored. Come to think of such a world, that would be even more painful than this one. Here, atleast we wish for something and strive for it anticipating the pleasure it's going to bring us. There, we don't even have that anticipation of pleasure which is very upsetting I think.

Probably, here lies the clue to our happiness.

What we want itself doesn't really matter. All the pleasure is in the sense of achievement, when we get what we desired. And the knowledge that we could have failed in achieving that, enhances the happiness we get when we really achieved it. And ofcourse, this is only one facet of happiness.