REFLECTIONS ON THE GOOD LIFE - Part 2

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

Reflections on the Good Life – Part 2

During the past few days, the mass media have been full of what have been called thought pieces about the 30^th anniversary of the EDSA Revolution. As almost everyone knows, this massive demonstration of protest again Marcos rule resulted in our enjoying freedom or what has been described by the phrase “democratic space in our society.”

The historic EDSA revolution ended decades of muzzled press and restrictions on our freedom. Those four days of bloodless or peaceful revolution were hailed as our gift to the world.

As I continue to distil insights from the book “The Good Life” by noted Australian psychologist, Hugh Mackay, I have at the back of my mind the sacrifices of hundreds of young people who gave their lives in those three decades of struggle leading to the historic EDSA days. All through the past thirty years, I have carried the burden of knowing that thirty-three (33) of my friends, doubtless among the best and brightest of our generation, were among those who perished in this struggle for freedom.

Each time I think about those EDSA days, I cannot help but be reminded about these outstanding Filipinos who sacrificed their lives so that most of us could be assured of freedom and our democratic rights, extinguished by the brutal Marcos regime. I salute them. My thirteen (13) years in the underground, some of them in detention in a military camp and restricted movement in an office, were nothing compared to their sacrifices.

Now back to the book, The Good Life-

I find Chapter 2 quite interesting. It deals with “How the pursuit of happiness can make you miserable.”

First, the author asserts: “The popular idea of happiness is focused on a pleasant sense of uplift, maximizing the possibility of positive emotional experiences, such as pleasure, gratification or fulfillment; nurturing a generally positive attitude. It goes without saying that we enjoy that uplift and sometimes seek out experiences that will create it. But if we confuse … such happiness with the good life, we create some emotional and cultural hazards for ourselves –even some moral hazards.”

Then he makes this distinction: “The most obvious one is that all the talk about happiness puts the emphasis on Me and how I’m feeling, whereas the goodness of life … is about moral sensitivity and integrity rather than emotional well-being.”

He says if this is accepted then “… it follows that the measure of a good life could hardly be based on some assessment of how happy we are; it will depend primarily upon how well we treat others, regardless of how that makes us feel.”

Mackay points out that “… an obsession with happiness can make us scared of sadness and rather unhealthy in our pursuit of the positive.”   He says without sadness we would never know how it is to be happy. Sadness is “too often and too quickly put under the microscope in case it turns out to be an early sign of the disease …” called clinical depression.

He observes: “Clinical depression, unlike sadness, is never going to visit most of us, and for that we can be grateful … Most won’t be crushed by the sense of futility, relentless anxiety or terminal bleakness that depression can visit on those who suffer from it, and who clearly need professional support and careful treatment.”

The obsession with happiness may be a result of “heightened awareness of … depression.” He says: “We want to avoid becoming depressed, just as we want to avoid heart disease, cancer or diabetes, and perhaps we think being happy is a preventive strategy, a bit like keeping fit, or watching your diet. Yet the truth is that to be fully human – to be normal, to be healthy – is to be occasionally engulfed by waves of grief or sadness, stymied by feelings of despair, paralyzed by doubt or crushed by disappointment.”

He says we must “be wary of pursuing happiness as the main goal of our life, not only because happiness is one of the most elusive and unpredictable of emotions, but also because  … most valuable experiences of emotional growth and personal development have come from pain, not pleasure.”

Sadness, he asserts, is not only “an authentic an emotion as happiness. It’s also far more instructive.”

He adds: “The fleeting moments of bliss and joy, and even the deeper sense of contentment that occasionally envelops us, make sense only because they represent such a contrast with the experience of pain, trauma, disappointment or sadness, or even with those times when we feel ourselves trapped in the drudgery of tedious, dreary routine.”

He clarifies this does not mean wishing sadness for ourselves and our children: “ It would be strange to welcome disappointment or trauma into our lives, but we might do well to accept that a noble, courageous, well-lived life is one in which we are equipped to experience and negotiate the full range of emotions: neither seduced by the lure of happiness nor obsessed by the grim and gritty aspects of life, but open to whatever comes and ready to learn from it all.

“Bereavement happens. Relationships break down. Illness takes its toll. Children (and parents) disappoint us. Friends let us down. We fail. What should we do? Pretend we’re not upset? Take a happy pill? Deny ourselves the chance to experiencing the full richness of human experience?”

The author notes : “Most of us have no trouble handling happiness, satisfaction, pleasure, euphoria, contentment or triumph. Even a little bliss is quite nice occasionally. But the fact that such emotions are so easy to manage is precisely the reason they don’t have much to teach us. In fact, too much euphoria can blind us to the truth of our situation.”

He cites this example: “Take falling in love. Most people experience that heady state as sublime form of it happiness, and yet from the outside it looks more like a mild neurosis. When we’re Hhead-over-heels in love, we’re typically quite dysfunctional, distracted, disorganized and inclined to make absurdly unrealistic judgements about all the wonderful qualities miraculously combined in the person who has become the object of our affection.”

Then he hit us with this insight: “… we do the same when we ‘fall in love’ with political leaders, investing unrealistic measures of hope and optimism in them and their ability to change society for the better.” Well, so there, just to nail the idea hard!

The author admits that that there’s an almost universal tendency to relieve ourselves “from relentlessness of our emotions so we can feel relaxed, elevated, excited or calm on demand.” 

He further observes: “It’s no accident that the happiness movement has coincided with an explosive increase in the use of recreational drugs in the general population and mood-altering drugs in psychiatry.” There is a frantic rush to control emotions to be able to produce happiness but an emotion “that can be summoned at will is not an authentic emotion.”

“If we allow ourselves to become preoccupied with the manipulation of our emotions, we risk becoming emotionally disabled unable to function without artificial support,” the author adds.

Then he makes this point: “An important step towards understanding and embracing the good life is to acknowledge that it has nothing to do with how you happen to be feeling from moment to moment. Living the good life isn’t always going to make you feel terrific … A kind or virtuous act performed for our own emotional benefit amounts to exploitation of the person towards whom we’ve acted charitably.”

A profound insight indeed. Then he suggests: “We need to delete our own happiness from the list of motives for any act that is going to count as noble or virtuous: such acts are exclusively about the benefit to others, without counting the cost, let alone the benefit to ourselves. To claim them as pathways to our happiness is to misread the whole idea of morality.”

Towards the end of this chapter, the author quotes the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Morality is not the doctrine of how we make ourselves happy but how we make ourselves worthy of happiness.”Concludes the author, Hugh Mackay: “At the core … of so much of the world’s wisdom, is the belief that  happiness is at best a by-product, not the goal, of a well-lived life.” ###    

 NMP/25 Feb 2016/6.15 p.m.