How can anyone be happy?

FreeSpirit99 · July 14, 2009, 2:17am

With death being guaranteed for all of us, our fate without any choice or other route, it’s just a matter of when and how we eventually perish. And then…eternal blackness for eternity.

How can anyone be happy knowing this? (This is not necessarily my personal opinion, by the way.)

PavlovianModel146 · July 14, 2009, 3:09am

By not dwelling on it. We all must be here in the meantime, regardless of what the end may or may not hold.

NinjaNavid · July 14, 2009, 4:11am

People are too quick to fear the unknown. Also, if it’s inevitable, why fear it? Happiness (in this regard) comes from the acceptance of life and death; this is nature’s way: you cannot have life without death, nor death without life. It all breaks even. Accept this, and do not fear it, and you will find peace…to be honest, I find it rather comforting that there is at least one certainty in this existence.

xzc · July 14, 2009, 5:07am

That realization is not enough to make happiness impossible for all people. It’s enough for most people, but not all. And one doesn’t need to stop thinking about their own deaths to continue experiencing happiness. Some people can be happy despite being fully aware that they can die at any moment. One can be happy despite this knowledge, and it’s not reasons that make this capacity possible. In other words, it’s not by laying around thinking why one should still be happy that one becomes capable of being happy despite knowing they will die. It’s through brute instinctual strength of will.

Three_Times_Great · July 14, 2009, 5:32am

denial and willful ignorance.

also, drugs (the ones our brains make for us).

Sidhe · July 14, 2009, 10:01am

I think someone needs to read the Myth of Sysiphus. By recognising the absurdity of life. And since I couldn’t hope to put it in anywhere near the same eloquent style as Camus I’ll just quote the last couple of pages:

sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00 … msysip.htm

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Edipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What!—by such narrow ways–?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Although this really only works for atheist or agnostics, the point is redundant for the religious in the main who never die anyway.

Essentially once you realise that the meaning of life is an absurd idea given life itself, it is only then in moments of reflection you are free to give up your burden, and in doing so freedom to achieve as much as you can in the time you have, which should be as long as it can be; in such an absurd Universe it is the only conclusion that would leave one happy, godless, bound to our task but surmounting out fate by scorn and defiance, and hence free. Not a bad philosophy I think.

Tab · July 14, 2009, 11:22am

I watch cartoons. They’re funny.

Standard23 · July 14, 2009, 9:14pm

Happiness in the face of nothingness is quite a flimsy prospect, but imagine life/conciousness never ended - that would make me unhappy, not to mention damn scared.

rackedrick · July 14, 2009, 9:23pm

That’s why there are antidepressants. They work for some people who take them and they are no longer depressed in general. People can also find happiness in that they are going to die. You assume like many others that death means darkness. There are people who would prefer darkness to life. If life was torture for you would you not prefer darkness? I sure would.

Nah · July 15, 2009, 5:46pm

Well, people who don’t like to live/exist would be very happy to know that they wont be living/existing in near future.

And we cannot be absolutely sure of the nature of the death, unless you are religious idiot who can believe fantasy tale.

After the physical death (or before the physical death, for the matter), we may have to go through different kind of death process, like mental death or the death of brain/nerve.
Although the death can be rosy and pleasant experience, it can also be dreadful/painful/hellish experience. We don’t know.
And we don;t know if it’s going to be eternal blackness, or eternal psychedelic insanity or brief moment of joy followed by immense madness, or whatever.

We don’t know.

Now, can you be happy?

Ingenium · July 15, 2009, 10:38pm

IMO, once you accept at a gut level (in other words, not just intellectually) the fact that you’re born dying, it can free your psyche and help you to live more in the present. Meditation helps with that. Also, it depends upon what you mean by happiness. People do a lot of dumb stuff in search of ‘happiness’, but it’s not real. What matters is doing the things necessary to be grounded in life, to be content and able to withstand the various ebbs and flows. I think those things include striving for stability in close relationships, taking proper care of mind/body, reflecting upon your morality, doing things for others often without expecting anything in return, working hard, taking responsibility for what you do, and challenging yourself now and then…getting out of the safety zone and observing how you manage it.

Oh, and turning off the electronics to just be with yourself now and then.

Only_Humean · July 17, 2009, 12:17pm

Of all the billions upon billions of possibilities that never have the pleasure of existence, you are one of the chosen few that gets to eat, see, feel, breathe, suffer, love, hate, expire. How could anyone NOT be happy? You’ve won the lottery a thousand times over!

This is not necessarily my personal opinion, by the way

Kriswest · July 17, 2009, 12:51pm

I agree. Thank the Gods for animators

Arcturus_Descending · July 17, 2009, 7:41pm

I would change the question - based upon what you say above to - HOW CAN ANYONE NOT BE HAPPY?

It really depends upon one’s frame of mind. Death is a constant companion that is always with us and so as such is a teacher that speaks to us, that shows us, to live NOW to our fullest.

If some of us truly believe that this life is all there is, then why not just let go and BE HAPPY?

Kriswest · July 17, 2009, 7:57pm

Arc, some people are happiest when they are miserable. If they ever giggled it would probably scare them

Arcturus_Descending · July 17, 2009, 7:59pm

Hi swamp girl - how are you? What you just wrote made me giggle. Giggling is a wonderful way to change our brain chemistry.

xzc · July 17, 2009, 11:39pm

I don’t understand this. Why do you think so? Has it been true for you? Anybody else?

Xilivai · July 18, 2009, 5:56am

I think anything is possible. That being said, I also think not dying is possible. Right now we are working on anti-ageing technology. Once we have dealt with that, we should eliminate disease. I know it’s easier said then done, but it is still possible. I do not think we can determine something to be inevitable unless we can fully understand it.

Jakob · July 18, 2009, 10:46am

Its stupid it be worried about death when you’re young.
A lot of people who had very active lives die in peace; ‘enough, or too much’.

NatashasGhost · July 18, 2009, 11:23pm

It’s precisely this observation that makes me happy. That I was born at all makes me happy. What is the probability that you would be born, and be conscious enough to question it? What is the probability of you being born in a place free enough to take advantage of what makes you happy?

I have no idea how I am conscious of my own life in a philosophical sense. However, I do know some things about how to care for my consciousness. I don’t get much done when I am upset about something. I am happiest with myself, and most capable of growth, when I am fulfilling my needs and desires. I have learned to allow for this growth in myself, in relation to other people around me, by realizing that no man owns another man, and that no man can morally initiate force against another. In this way I can BE what makes me happy. Those around me are also free to BE what makes them happy. As I stated, I have no idea how I am conscious, but if someone gave me a gift, then I will honor them the best way I can–by honoring myself and those around me and taking the most advantage of it that I can. I’m an athiest, so in my view of it, I am simply honoring myself and my life and those that come in contact with my life, for the simple pleasure of BEing able to. If someone believes in god I do not understand how they can’t come to same conclusion. If god gave you this gift of consciousness, why do you have a such a hard time loving it? Why do you seem to need to insist on something more, something better? Seems very childlike to me.