Happiness

            In our current world of cynicism and cultural/spiritual dissolution, there is much confusion as to what constitutes happiness. In our time, happiness is conceived as a commodity, even though to be fair, this aspect of man has always been with us since time immemorial. Today, many people have come to regard happiness as a right that is conferred on us as an entitlement by the state and other welfare institutions.

             However, keeping with the nature of commodities, happiness thus, is something that merely fulfills a function of our day-to-day activities. Because happiness is viewed as a commodity - a cheap one that can easily be prostituted according to timely demands - it is then not difficult to realize why so many vacuous souls today view happiness as something that must always be attained from the outside, something one picks up off a candy store shelf, as it were.

            The plastic surgery industry is a vivid but lamentable example of what happens to people when they opt for a life that is lived merely for the moment. So, too, is our home foreclosure disaster. I suppose that pity is the worst emotion that one can reserve for some people. Such vanity speaks for itself: Vanitas, in Latin means emptiness.

             Horace is right in asserting that it is reason and sense that remove anxiety, not houses that overlook the sea. Needless to say, ours is not a time that has any use for wisdom. This, of course, is one of the central contradictions and potent ironies that inform our time, because judging by all practical accounts, people in our day and age can make tremendous gains by incorporating wisdom in their lives.

          Happiness is truly a condition of human beings that should concern us as whole persons. Realistically, when we talk about happiness and contentment, we are talking about the state of our being during any given stage of our lives. This may ebb and flow throughout our lives, of course, the key, however, is to remain reasonable in the demands that we make of objective reality.

            This mature sense and sensibility for happiness is one that is pre-reflective in nature. In other words, if one has to ask what happiness is, then clearly that person, like characters in Woody Allen films, is definitely not happy. This, then, is contentment. This may seem like a strange notion to vain people.  In our time, rarely do we ever concern ourselves with the totality of Being, "the glow of being," Sinatra refers to this in one of his marvelous songs.

            People in our age have gotten so insipid that we constantly hear cries of “What good is wisdom for?” This is readily followed by the question, “What do you mean by wisdom?”           

Unfortunately, the insolvent degree of our characterless age is also well represented by the professional class. This is one reason why I have no desire to dwell in textbook accounts of happiness. This would only amount to an exercise in fruition. What the philosophy and ethics professors have to say about happiness today does not concern me the slightest. One cannot live vitally and authentically by embracing sophomoric notions that originate in graduate seminars that have little or no bearing on the real world of people of flesh and bones.