Is Happiness the Right Life Goal?

When I was in my early teens, I wanted nothing more than to be respected by my peers. By age eighteen, I wanted to change the world and be recognised as a great mind of the century, maybe even the millennia. A few years later that goal altered to the smaller but perhaps no less difficult, achieving personal well-being.

My wish for well-being led me to spend the last three years trying to understand my mind and body well enough to make it a more habitable place. And in some ways, I've achieved that. I'm no longer needlessly cruel to myself on a minute by minute basis. My body functions a hell of a lot better than it used to. I panic less and smile more. That's good, right? But is that it?

I live on the assumption that unless you aim for something, you won't get it. The author Leigh Bardugo puts it sweetly, "The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true." If that is true, then what on earth should we be aiming for? What should the goal of life be?

There's a John Lennon quote that used to pop up on my Facebook (when people still used Facebook) a lot.

"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life."

I don't usually take life advice from Facebook or five-year-olds but 'do what makes you happy' sounds right, doesn't it? Except that it rings alarm bells in my head. If there's one thing I've learned in my journey to making my mind a habitable place, it's not to push my negative emotions away. I've learned not to treat them like pariahs and let them have their say so that I can work through whatever is bothering me. For example, back in my studying days, I used to become anxious because I often felt that I was too unintelligent to complete a piece of coursework. My go-to response was to try to push the anxiety away and tell myself that I was being irrational, to get on with my work and it would all be fine. But of course that only made me feel more stupid about being anxious and the situation would deteriorate. Now I have a kinder approach which is much more productive.

Doesn't that mean that aiming for a single emotional state, such as happiness is unhealthy? Is it a dangerously exclusionary method born from a society that considers crying a sign of weakness and suicide an act of selfishness? Or am I misunderstanding the idea of happiness? I suppose it depends on whether I'm talking about the emotional state or some overriding principle of life happiness. Given that I've personally vetoed happiness as an emotional state, as a good life goal, let's explore the overriding principle thing, where happiness is more akin to fulfillment.

I used to think that fulfillment was simply how close your life was to your idea of a perfect life. It made perfect sense to me, I thought that people were commonly unfulfilled because they had impossible ideas of the perfect life. Take the ideal, wanting to be liked by most other people. You can't ever know for sure if other people like you (unless you can read minds), so you can always convince yourself that they don't, therefore you can always be unfulfilled. I thought that to be fulfilled, all you needed was an achievable idea of a perfect life. However, over the last few years, I've experienced a contradiction to that definition of fulfillment.

While I attended university, I truly believed that in a perfect life I would be a scientist exploring some concept that would eventually change the world for the better. The trouble was that I hated the practice of being a scientist. I hated lab work, I hated coding, I hated the day-to-day of research. I liked my definition of fulfillment, it was neat. So, I insisted that the contradiction was due to two conflicting life ideals. In a perfect life, I would be good at what I did. In labs I was clumsy and I felt I was an inadequate coder, therefore the conflict between wanting to be a scientist and wanting to feel good enough, lead to a lack of general life happiness.

The problem with that reasoning is that currently, my work as a musician feels very fulfilling but I constantly feel incompetent. I still love it. So what on earth is this overarching principle of happiness?! It's so wishy-washy, how am I supposed to aim for something I don't understand?

New theory! Perhaps the difficulty is that I'm trying to come up with some over-arching life principle that spans multiple parts of my consciousness that don't combine that well. Bare with me, I will explain. The brain is made up of many parts that evolved at different times over the millennia. Some highly emotional bits in the limbic system that are quite old and some newer bits that are good at logical reasoning in the cortices. They work together but they are still distinct. My old definition of fulfillment, that fulfillment was simply how close your life was to your idea of a perfect life, fits the reasoning parts of the brain well. It sucks at taking into account the less rational emotional parts. The parts that won't throw away my old teddy bears because somehow, I believe they will feel sad if I don't want them anymore. I'm searching for a rational definition for something that is being experienced by a partly irrational organ.

If this is right, it means my definition of fulfillment/happiness and my life goal must be by nature wishy-washy. I need to have both an idea of a perfect life that is achievable and an inexplicable feeling of 'rightness' when I do things. The scientist in my head hates this new idea, the artist loves it. Tricky...