The pursuit of happiness

"One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers."
—Eugene O'Neill

A coworker's homepage "quote of the hit" generator served me up this gem (tongue lightly in cheek) today. There was a time when I voiced an opinion much like it. There is both truth and deception within it.

In its declarative document, our fledgling nation included "the pursuit of happiness" among the unalienable rights endowed to us by our Creator. While this raises the observation that many of us today don't believe in a creator, this post will not sojourn further along such a divisive, and likely useless, trajectory.

More helpful, for me, is a careful consideration of this contrast O'Neill draws between joyfulness and contentedness. During one particularly passionate period of my life, I too lamented the contentment for which I felt I'd settled theretofore, clinging to my newfound (and, in this case, verboten) excitement and delight. "I don't want to settle for just being content!" I bemoaned.

Let me be clear before developing my thoughts further: I do not now believe contentment should be our goal any more so than happiness, passion, excitement, or delight.

Still, the mistake that O'Neill and I, and much of our society, have shared in common has at its root the problem of forgetting the purpose of our existence. The answer to the age-old question, "Why are we here?" has become, for many of us, nothing more than to experience all of the happiness -- all of the excitement, passion, delight, and success -- that we possibly can.

Now in my forties, I'm (just barely) too young to have learned from the old Baltimore Catechism as a child, yet I've heard many of my elders in the faith repeat from deep-rooted memory: "God made me to know Him, to love Him and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven." Matthew Kelly, writing so as to appeal to a more secular audience while honoring his Catholic faith, posits that each person has an essential purpose, and for each of us it is the same: to become the best-version-of-ourselves. Interestingly, the things that make us the best-version-of-ourselves in each area of our life are also those things that maximize our true happiness. Yet paradoxically, the pursuit of happiness as a goal in and of itself usually leaves us disillusioned and disappointed. It is only by striving to become the best-version-of-myself that I experience the most happiness amid all the other emotions that this life brings.

(One important point that Kelly is always careful to tie closely together with this concept: we mustn't get the pursuit of excellence in any one area of our life out of context with the rest. We each have four distinct and important aspects of our selves: the physical, the intellectual, the emotional, and the spiritual. Overemphasize or neglect any of the four, and our lives become out of balance, preventing us from becoming the overall best-version-of-ourselves and reducing our happiness.)

Back to Eugene O'Neill: I agree with him that we ought not make contentment our end. If we do, we will stagnate, no longer striving to become the best-version-of-ourselves or to know, love, and serve God in each situation. Such satisfaction leads to complacency, which keeps us from growing and loving as we ought. But if we make happiness -- unalienable right though we may have declared its pursuit -- joyfulness, or any other more intense emotion our goal in its place, we are likely to make decisions in its pursuit that make us less than the people we could be, and hurt those around us in the process. Ahh, but if we pursue the goal of becoming the best-version-of-ourselves, we will grow through the pursuit of excellence in our lives, and those feelings of joy, passion, or even "mere" contentment, will more frequently result.

As emotional beings, we will each at times feel glad, sad, angry, or afraid, and any number of combinations and degrees thereof. Often, the external circumstances that invoke the more undesirable of these emotions in our lives are beyond our control, so we cannot hope to eliminate these feelings completely. Nor should we; they serve as important indicators, stimuli, responses. However, it is also true that we unconsciously nurture these less desireable feelings by many of our decisions. We do this most frequently when we're out of balance, or when we're striving to fulfill the wrong purpose.