Happiness - Essay 2

The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older – William Lyon Phelps

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years – Mark Twain

The young suffer less from their own errors than from the cautiousness of the old – Vauvenargues

It is better to waste one’s youth than to do nothing with it at all – Georges Courteline

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis about 40 years before the physical kind – Aldous Huxley.

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Reflective essay on one or more of the quotes
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Perhaps the most certain thing about happiness is its elusiveness. To define, isolate, pin-point or just wave a hand in the general direction of happiness is impossible. It can be constantly moving away from us, yet we know it's always in the same place. To suggest that happiness is the result of single inputs, such as the interesting thoughts prescribed by WL Phelps, is an oversimplification that takes us no nearer to this goal. Surveys attempting to quantify happiness generally do find that it increases with age. Some people suggest that this is more due to a realisation than it is to a specific circumstance or stimulus. They say we are already happy, like the man who travelled around the world only to find what he was looking for when he returned home, we are already there but are so focused on deciphering the directions we haven't noticed yet. How this explains the increasing distance one can feel from happiness, after once being certain they were happy, is not clear. Proponents of 'realisation' theory, may then invoke the caveat of 'truth' - True Happiness. True happiness comes from within, so if you were once happy, but are not now, that happiness was a house of cards built on objects and people that assured us that we had what we wanted and were therefore happy. Others suggest that happiness comes from helping others. Some of the happiest times in my life have been involved a combination of shared adventure, learning new skills, helping people and achieving goals. The stark ommissions from that list are clearly the aspects of my life I take for granted - health, security, feeling loved and having someone to love. And the list is probably longer.

My feeling is that, like most things in life, there is a place in between the theories on happiness - although the two dimensional spectrum of a 'grey area' is again too simple. A multidimensional (including time) kaleidoscope may be more appropriate. From within and without, through time and space - we may recognise happiness when we see it, but the chaotic course of events may spin us around, leaving us disoriented and bewildered now unsure of what happiness was. Our fuzzy memory of how it felt to be happy only serves to distract and confuse us more in our pursuit of it. But what use is a discourse on happiness without a road map to its location or a tip on where the maps are hidden? I would suggest that we can take action to create an environment that we enjoy (which for me are those four variables above), but without the belief that we are already at our destination, we won't get there.