On Happiness.
Yesterday I read the commencement speech of UChicago 2017 given by David Brooks. Then I picked up a question that has puzzled me for a long time：what is the purpose of life? It is ironic that I encountered this question again, now, at this state. And somehow I still don't have a clear answer, although I have made some progress over the past few years.
Before reading Plato's dialogues, I believed that happiness is the sole purpose. For what else can possibly matter besides my happiness? Sufferings are just means to achieve a higher happiness. Humans live for happiness. However, this answer never satisfies me and it even begins to collapse on its own.
The fallacy of happiness can be proved by a simple idea. Simply, that happiness is transitory, never permanent. We become happy, and we become unhappy, whether it is sadness, dissatisfaction or boredom. The ideal permanent happiness simply doesn't exist. Then how can we chase happiness as the sole purpose of life? If it is transient and therefore not a substance that one can hold onto when one encounters challenges and hardships in life. I thought, there must be something more.
But I struggle to defend my position, that life is not only about happiness or for happiness, but a higher purpose that's unknown. This purpose is like a beam of light that guides one in the darkness, but only sometimes it shines. Most of the time the light is invisible.
The existence of this light can be proved by a deeper yearning all humans share. People who seek happiness as the highest purpose of life find themselves lacking. There is a deeper desire that is unexplainable and whenever we achieve happiness we become dissatisfied immediately again. This yearning manifests and disturbs whatever life one is living. The happier one gets, the more despair one experiences. This yearning, I think, is an intense curiosity for meaning. It urges one to live and it becomes the creative force of life.
Life is a making - a making of one's identity as well as a making of giving meaning to time and space. In Buddhism, this shaping of life depends on an inexplicable destiny of the cosmo. Precisely, it is a causal relationship that humans are too small to understand. Achieving happiness therefore does not ensure meaning to life. Happiness and sadness are just sensations that we experience as we take on the journey. Finding out one's position in the cosmo is seeking meaning and living. Yet locating oneself requires one's creative force of shaping who one is as well as understanding a bigger vision of the cosmo which does not orient upon oneself. Only by combining the two one can correctly place oneself in the history of time and space.
It's interesting how humans forever ask this question of the meaning of life and there is never a convincing answer, because it is simply not anything. It is something that humans can't fathom, something that requires personal effort to endlessly seek. The life one lives is not a journey to a destination but a struggle. One can stop at the wrong station along the way and stagnate, and be satisfied with a current happiness. But one would later, hopefully soon, find a hollowness that eats the soul and lose oneself in this complicated world. Life is such a challenge.
I am very thankful that writing and reading, the two things I shall never abandon in my life, rescue me at crucial moments. They indicate struggles from the outside and then I recognize my vision, my desires, my addictions, and my avoidance. Then courage - freedom can be only afforded by courage - an extreme courage to recognize one's weakness. I'm just ashamed that my writing is still not appealing enough, to my own heart. Something is missing and I need to figure out the yearning.
Back to running again.. beautiful morning beautiful sky.
And the speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCW4bf7YLU0