Conditioned Happiness

This post was adapted from something that I had previously written.

What is happiness? What makes us happy? Do we even know?

Happiness is an emotion. When things go how we want them to, this emotion kicks in. This emotion can have long-term positive effects or appear as a short period of enjoyment.

Although I have to admit that I haven’t experienced true happiness, I know that I am not alone. Instead, people have been enjoying a substitute provided by society. It is not unusual for someone to think they are happy when they are miserable on a deeper level.

In many ways, this comes down to quality of life. If we have freedom to live our lives to their fullest we have a better chance of being happy. When we live lives that are controlled, we have to fool ourselves into thinking that we are happy. Let’s face reality. We have no freedom and our lives are controlled.

We are bombarded with beliefs that we are told that we have to share. In America, we insist that money is everything. To feel happy, we have to have money and other possessions. Actual quality of life is insignificant. We are ultimately conditioned to feel something similar to happiness whenever we hit society’s conditions for the emotion. Like I said before, this is not true happiness.

Conditioned happiness comes more from an obligation to feel happy rather than a deeper more meaningful emotion. The intensity of this feeling can’t match that of true happiness. Additionally, our own personal happiness is better for humanity as a whole. To improve the quality of life to reach a level where we can feel true happiness, we will have to improve the quality of life for those around us.

Another problem with conditioned happiness is that the controls creating the feeling can lead to misery. Others will generally mistreat those who do not conform to meet the conditions required for this pseudo-emotion. This mistreatment can lead to hardships and depression.

With how bad things are in this world, I highly doubt that anyone is truly happy. I’m sure that you can find people who believe that they are happy. Unfortunately, these people are delusional. I’m not saying that true happiness shouldn’t or can’t exist. I’m saying that it doesn’t exist.