Because I'm nerdy...
Some thoughts, courtesy of my English professor:
"Happiness is something most of you will never think about. That may seem like a challenging statement. We think about happiness in the sense that we more or less accept the cultural definitions we are given, and pursue them. Didn’t we talk about in class what would happen to you psychologically if you didn’t go to college? So you can sort of tell that most American teenagers see college as a logical next step in the “good life” or being happy, if you didn’t get to go to college your life wouldn’t be as a good, you wouldn’t be as happy. Probably few high school seniors think about the relationship between happiness and college, it’s just sort of assumed. So the difficulty in this topic is going to be beating through our cultural preconceptions for getting us to really think about what happiness is.
"What is the nature of happiness? Notice I used the word “nature.” I did this deliberately. If I asked, “what is happiness?” all sorts of one-word answers would be easy to come up with. When I ask you what is the nature of happiness, it is more difficult. And what we’re really thinking about, and I’m trying to help us understand the more sophisticated intellectual issue implicit in this discussion, is not so much, “what is my immediate preference in life,” but “what is the nature of happiness?” You can tell that this is much more difficult, and maybe more interesting.
"Intellectual discovery leads to a more full, enriched life. And in a crazy kind of way, this is the kind of conversation we’re trying to have now. Happiness...by god, who doesn’t want it? So in a sense we’re trying to get at an understanding of what happiness is, and then kind of look at what we do in our culture and individually in terms of where we go to find happiness. So I’m trying to help us recognize that we want to approach this in a fun way, I want to have fun with the topic, but we want to sort of think more seriously than we have in the past."
"(Student said that cornbread is happiness.) That’s true, maybe for him…but it isn’t. You can tell if I took cornbread away from him, he’d still be happy. So we’re trying to figure out what, if it isn’t there, in its absence, helps us. (Student then says, ambition). Oh, this is good! So if I took ambition out of the universe, would I take happiness out of the universe? (Student says is you take ambition out of the world, it’s not going to eliminate happiness altogether.) Right! And that’s what I was trying to say. In other words, ambition really isn’t a part of the nature of happiness. It can make some people, some of the time, happy, but I can do away with it in some sense, and even for the ambitious I haven’t destroyed the nature of happiness. Does everybody kind of feel that? Do you think that’s true?
"(Student says that relationships bring happiness.) Okay, so the nature of happiness has a lot to do with relationships and acceptance. And I suspect, that status is another form of acceptance. You know, you want a status so that you are accepted in certain ways. (Student says that Thoreau wrote about happiness with himself.) Right! See? So it doesn’t have to be with others. It can be with self. And you can tell that most of time our culture tells us that you cannot be happy unless you have a significant other. (Student says it’s the love, not the significant other.) Sure, so it’s the love that comes from outside you, we’ll put it that way. (Student says that love has to come from inside of you.) Yeah, but see, our culture isn’t sending us that message. Remember those crazy ads I handed out the other day? You seldom see an ad, when it’s trying to sell something like beer, or cosmetics, or clothing, unless it’s contextualized, and how that things going to create relationships.
"Religion is what? It’s an attempt to establish a relationship with the finite and the infinite. So that’s saying that the nature of happiness is harmony. Those days we have, we don’t have those often as we like, but when most of one’s life is going well, my being is in some kind of harmony with my being, and the world outside of me. That’s an interesting idea, because all sorts of philosophy, philosophers, and religion say that’s the nature of happiness. The nature of happiness is defined by harmony, one-ness, peace. And the nature of unhappiness is disharmony, the absence of connectedness, or relationship. The archetypal myth of Christianity is what? Where does disharmony come into religion? Not understanding the nature of harmony, breaking harmony. What man did, see, there was harmony going on, he didn’t recognize it, and he broke it! And he lives in a continual state of disharmony, unhappiness. This is neat. Buddhism and Hinduism, as far as I know, both have the same fundamental concept in the way in which they define the nature of happiness. The nature of happiness is defined as harmony, one-ness, interaction with the over-soul, you know, this is what Thoreau was doing.
"The corruption of human nature leads to a corrupt sense of happiness, and if you aren’t corrupt that way, and you’re still happy, then you’re naïve to the fact that this is the way people are. Like the ignorance is bliss thing, if I don’t know about poverty, I can be indifferent to it, and therefore find my own happiness. If I really carry, as Christians arguably do, the obligation to mitigate suffering of others, how can I be happy if there is one person on this world who is suffering? See it? If we could take ourselves out to Sudan, and then we have to live there not for a day, but for a month, or a year, and really observe what it means to starve to death, not one, or two, but tens of thousands, and watch people being killed and raped and brutalized, not for a day, not for a week, but for a year, all of a sudden if I really know what suffering is like, and I know it’s going on in the world, I think there is something in human nature that won’t let me just shut it off. So, ironically, what is happening to you guys in college is a threat to ‘ignorance is bliss.’
"Does the examined life bring happiness? Or does it bring happiness in a way different from what we ordinarily think of happiness? Socrates would argue that ignorance is not bliss. The unexamined life is not worth living. So I might lose some of that naïve happiness, but do I gain some other kind of happiness?
"(Small discussion about stoicism.) So this idea of surrendering what I cannot control as a means of becoming happy is a powerful idea, but very hard to achieve. And notice how we’re drawn to it. You can tell Christianity makes this same argument. You can see how I would be better if I can do this, and to some extent, some people, some of the time, try. The theory is that the human mind is capable of changing its behavior or using what it learns to alter what it does. If I really understand that in some situations it is better not to try to control if I want to be happy. And this is where it starts to get difficult because we’re trying to rethink the nature of happiness. We’re not trying to come up with what I already think and slam it into what we’re talking about. What we’ve got to do is at least try to understand this other perspective and then come back to our own perspective to try to get the two to come together.
"Keep in mind, then, that if you think you’re free, that by nature you are slavish, and you think things that are up to others are yours, you will be hindered, and you will suffer, you will complain, you will blame the gods and your fellows. On the other hand, if you take as yours only what in fact is yours, you see what belongs to you, and what belongs to others, nobody compels you, nobody will restrict you, you will blame nobody, you will do nothing against your will, no one will harm you, and you will have no enemies. It’s a state of mind. Only “I” can become angry. Let’s put it this way, you will not become angry if you don’t try to control the stupidity of others.
"If I don’t know who or what I am, I suck in everything around me in order to get something that looks like what I might be. See? I don’t try to find myself in the things that are part of me; I just drag in things. Young boys, what do they want? You know, they want cars that make noise and are red. Why? Well because that thing out there somehow gives them something they feel they don’t have by themselves. There is nothing there inside, so they take something from the outside and put it in. I’m sorry, but that car, and you guys know this, two years from now it’s out of date. So the car is not really you, it’s just substituting you.
"If I’m sick and I’m going to die, it may be out of my control, but I can choose how I’m going to respond to that situation. It’s difficult. Most of us would start blaming people, the gods, the health system, the tobacco company, whatever the hell else it is, but he’s arguing that, you know, you’re not going to be happy by doing that. You going to focus on being angry and injured and all kinds of things, when in fact, you’ve got your cancer and you’re going to die. So now what are you going to do? We’re all going to die. It’s a nasty truth about life. The beginning of life is the beginning of death. And so, it’s silly in a way to try to hold onto what you can’t control, or try to fear or worry about what you can’t control. It’s there; it’s coming. What you can do is have some control over how you respond to this part of life; this moment that you’re living in.
"If I told you guys that no one who graduates from Berry College will make more than $10,000 a year, everyone would leave. You can just tell all of a sudden that college is not about college; it’s about what is going to happen after college; it’s a lever arm for other stuff. There is nothing wrong with that, but you can tell, if life is lived that way, how can I be happy? From about 10-15 years old, all you want is age. You want to be old. Being old looks a hell of a lot better than being young. So you try to grab it, and what you do when you grab it is miss happiness. Interesting isn’t it?
"By now, you all recognize the naivety of trying to be old in order to be mature. I didn’t say that well. In trying to have the physical attributes of being old, smoking cigarettes, driving cars, whatever the hell it is that young people don’t have and they want a hold of, those things don’t bring you happiness, or maturity. And most of you by now has sort of passed by the frenetic “if I don’t have this, I’m a no-good person.” It’s still in us a little bit, see, but you can push it out a lot more if you wanted to. And all of a sudden when I’m not trying to look at all the things I’m not, I get to look at all the things I’ve got. And you can just tell in this class, what we have today together is a semi-interesting conversation. I mean it’s not a great conversation, but it’s okay. And it’s a part of where you are in life. You can imagine some students, who are not as good as you guys, are thinking about what they’re going to do tonight, what’s their next class is, their boyfriend/girlfriend and all of a sudden their reaching for a plate they can’t grab while there is one staring them in the face that they can!
"(More talk on stoicism.) The idea is that happiness is not in this world. And if you can resist things of this world, then you’ll find happiness. That’s also a very strong message in the New Testament. And in a crazy kind of way, that is what Thoreau was trying to do, finding happiness not from this world, but in him.
"(Some talk on determinism) Life is already written, like predestination, like a play, and you can’t really change it, you just go through it and do what you’ve got to do. And if you recognize that, you try to live the play as it unfolds before you and you make that happiness.
"(Biology) There is a reasonable probability that our genes in fact determine much of our behavior. So that we have the illusion of choice, but our personality, a lot of what we do, a lot of what we think, is actually wired into the mechanism. It’s a push-pull kind of thing. Some of our behavior is actually influenced by the environment and some of our behavior is actually influenced by what we are.
"Do we have a choice in defining what we think happiness is, or are we just going to be determined by our culture? It may not be God that is doing the determining, but our culture. And we buy it without thinking.
"Doesn’t it happen some of the time, when you’re reading for a class or studying, there is a certain happiness in the process of seeing and learning and thinking and knowing something new? It’s harder for us to imagine that when we grow up that we’re going to go sit in our library at night, kill the television, and read." -Dr. Cooley
Remember this was only day one; all conclusions about the nature of happiness will be made in the next few weeks.
In case anyone is wondering, I record all my lectures on a digital voice recorder, that way I can listen to them twice (occasionally) and write down all the good parts of the lecture. Well, for some reason I felt compelled to share parts of Dr. Cooley's lecture on happiness because I feel like we're going down the right path with it (I hope I'm not breaking the law). I was so scared the conversation would get trite, but Cooley has led us into a good direction.
James
"Happiness is something most of you will never think about. That may seem like a challenging statement. We think about happiness in the sense that we more or less accept the cultural definitions we are given, and pursue them. Didn’t we talk about in class what would happen to you psychologically if you didn’t go to college? So you can sort of tell that most American teenagers see college as a logical next step in the “good life” or being happy, if you didn’t get to go to college your life wouldn’t be as a good, you wouldn’t be as happy. Probably few high school seniors think about the relationship between happiness and college, it’s just sort of assumed. So the difficulty in this topic is going to be beating through our cultural preconceptions for getting us to really think about what happiness is.
"What is the nature of happiness? Notice I used the word “nature.” I did this deliberately. If I asked, “what is happiness?” all sorts of one-word answers would be easy to come up with. When I ask you what is the nature of happiness, it is more difficult. And what we’re really thinking about, and I’m trying to help us understand the more sophisticated intellectual issue implicit in this discussion, is not so much, “what is my immediate preference in life,” but “what is the nature of happiness?” You can tell that this is much more difficult, and maybe more interesting.
"Intellectual discovery leads to a more full, enriched life. And in a crazy kind of way, this is the kind of conversation we’re trying to have now. Happiness...by god, who doesn’t want it? So in a sense we’re trying to get at an understanding of what happiness is, and then kind of look at what we do in our culture and individually in terms of where we go to find happiness. So I’m trying to help us recognize that we want to approach this in a fun way, I want to have fun with the topic, but we want to sort of think more seriously than we have in the past."
"(Student said that cornbread is happiness.) That’s true, maybe for him…but it isn’t. You can tell if I took cornbread away from him, he’d still be happy. So we’re trying to figure out what, if it isn’t there, in its absence, helps us. (Student then says, ambition). Oh, this is good! So if I took ambition out of the universe, would I take happiness out of the universe? (Student says is you take ambition out of the world, it’s not going to eliminate happiness altogether.) Right! And that’s what I was trying to say. In other words, ambition really isn’t a part of the nature of happiness. It can make some people, some of the time, happy, but I can do away with it in some sense, and even for the ambitious I haven’t destroyed the nature of happiness. Does everybody kind of feel that? Do you think that’s true?
"(Student says that relationships bring happiness.) Okay, so the nature of happiness has a lot to do with relationships and acceptance. And I suspect, that status is another form of acceptance. You know, you want a status so that you are accepted in certain ways. (Student says that Thoreau wrote about happiness with himself.) Right! See? So it doesn’t have to be with others. It can be with self. And you can tell that most of time our culture tells us that you cannot be happy unless you have a significant other. (Student says it’s the love, not the significant other.) Sure, so it’s the love that comes from outside you, we’ll put it that way. (Student says that love has to come from inside of you.) Yeah, but see, our culture isn’t sending us that message. Remember those crazy ads I handed out the other day? You seldom see an ad, when it’s trying to sell something like beer, or cosmetics, or clothing, unless it’s contextualized, and how that things going to create relationships.
"Religion is what? It’s an attempt to establish a relationship with the finite and the infinite. So that’s saying that the nature of happiness is harmony. Those days we have, we don’t have those often as we like, but when most of one’s life is going well, my being is in some kind of harmony with my being, and the world outside of me. That’s an interesting idea, because all sorts of philosophy, philosophers, and religion say that’s the nature of happiness. The nature of happiness is defined by harmony, one-ness, peace. And the nature of unhappiness is disharmony, the absence of connectedness, or relationship. The archetypal myth of Christianity is what? Where does disharmony come into religion? Not understanding the nature of harmony, breaking harmony. What man did, see, there was harmony going on, he didn’t recognize it, and he broke it! And he lives in a continual state of disharmony, unhappiness. This is neat. Buddhism and Hinduism, as far as I know, both have the same fundamental concept in the way in which they define the nature of happiness. The nature of happiness is defined as harmony, one-ness, interaction with the over-soul, you know, this is what Thoreau was doing.
"The corruption of human nature leads to a corrupt sense of happiness, and if you aren’t corrupt that way, and you’re still happy, then you’re naïve to the fact that this is the way people are. Like the ignorance is bliss thing, if I don’t know about poverty, I can be indifferent to it, and therefore find my own happiness. If I really carry, as Christians arguably do, the obligation to mitigate suffering of others, how can I be happy if there is one person on this world who is suffering? See it? If we could take ourselves out to Sudan, and then we have to live there not for a day, but for a month, or a year, and really observe what it means to starve to death, not one, or two, but tens of thousands, and watch people being killed and raped and brutalized, not for a day, not for a week, but for a year, all of a sudden if I really know what suffering is like, and I know it’s going on in the world, I think there is something in human nature that won’t let me just shut it off. So, ironically, what is happening to you guys in college is a threat to ‘ignorance is bliss.’
"Does the examined life bring happiness? Or does it bring happiness in a way different from what we ordinarily think of happiness? Socrates would argue that ignorance is not bliss. The unexamined life is not worth living. So I might lose some of that naïve happiness, but do I gain some other kind of happiness?
"(Small discussion about stoicism.) So this idea of surrendering what I cannot control as a means of becoming happy is a powerful idea, but very hard to achieve. And notice how we’re drawn to it. You can tell Christianity makes this same argument. You can see how I would be better if I can do this, and to some extent, some people, some of the time, try. The theory is that the human mind is capable of changing its behavior or using what it learns to alter what it does. If I really understand that in some situations it is better not to try to control if I want to be happy. And this is where it starts to get difficult because we’re trying to rethink the nature of happiness. We’re not trying to come up with what I already think and slam it into what we’re talking about. What we’ve got to do is at least try to understand this other perspective and then come back to our own perspective to try to get the two to come together.
"Keep in mind, then, that if you think you’re free, that by nature you are slavish, and you think things that are up to others are yours, you will be hindered, and you will suffer, you will complain, you will blame the gods and your fellows. On the other hand, if you take as yours only what in fact is yours, you see what belongs to you, and what belongs to others, nobody compels you, nobody will restrict you, you will blame nobody, you will do nothing against your will, no one will harm you, and you will have no enemies. It’s a state of mind. Only “I” can become angry. Let’s put it this way, you will not become angry if you don’t try to control the stupidity of others.
"If I don’t know who or what I am, I suck in everything around me in order to get something that looks like what I might be. See? I don’t try to find myself in the things that are part of me; I just drag in things. Young boys, what do they want? You know, they want cars that make noise and are red. Why? Well because that thing out there somehow gives them something they feel they don’t have by themselves. There is nothing there inside, so they take something from the outside and put it in. I’m sorry, but that car, and you guys know this, two years from now it’s out of date. So the car is not really you, it’s just substituting you.
"If I’m sick and I’m going to die, it may be out of my control, but I can choose how I’m going to respond to that situation. It’s difficult. Most of us would start blaming people, the gods, the health system, the tobacco company, whatever the hell else it is, but he’s arguing that, you know, you’re not going to be happy by doing that. You going to focus on being angry and injured and all kinds of things, when in fact, you’ve got your cancer and you’re going to die. So now what are you going to do? We’re all going to die. It’s a nasty truth about life. The beginning of life is the beginning of death. And so, it’s silly in a way to try to hold onto what you can’t control, or try to fear or worry about what you can’t control. It’s there; it’s coming. What you can do is have some control over how you respond to this part of life; this moment that you’re living in.
"If I told you guys that no one who graduates from Berry College will make more than $10,000 a year, everyone would leave. You can just tell all of a sudden that college is not about college; it’s about what is going to happen after college; it’s a lever arm for other stuff. There is nothing wrong with that, but you can tell, if life is lived that way, how can I be happy? From about 10-15 years old, all you want is age. You want to be old. Being old looks a hell of a lot better than being young. So you try to grab it, and what you do when you grab it is miss happiness. Interesting isn’t it?
"By now, you all recognize the naivety of trying to be old in order to be mature. I didn’t say that well. In trying to have the physical attributes of being old, smoking cigarettes, driving cars, whatever the hell it is that young people don’t have and they want a hold of, those things don’t bring you happiness, or maturity. And most of you by now has sort of passed by the frenetic “if I don’t have this, I’m a no-good person.” It’s still in us a little bit, see, but you can push it out a lot more if you wanted to. And all of a sudden when I’m not trying to look at all the things I’m not, I get to look at all the things I’ve got. And you can just tell in this class, what we have today together is a semi-interesting conversation. I mean it’s not a great conversation, but it’s okay. And it’s a part of where you are in life. You can imagine some students, who are not as good as you guys, are thinking about what they’re going to do tonight, what’s their next class is, their boyfriend/girlfriend and all of a sudden their reaching for a plate they can’t grab while there is one staring them in the face that they can!
"(More talk on stoicism.) The idea is that happiness is not in this world. And if you can resist things of this world, then you’ll find happiness. That’s also a very strong message in the New Testament. And in a crazy kind of way, that is what Thoreau was trying to do, finding happiness not from this world, but in him.
"(Some talk on determinism) Life is already written, like predestination, like a play, and you can’t really change it, you just go through it and do what you’ve got to do. And if you recognize that, you try to live the play as it unfolds before you and you make that happiness.
"(Biology) There is a reasonable probability that our genes in fact determine much of our behavior. So that we have the illusion of choice, but our personality, a lot of what we do, a lot of what we think, is actually wired into the mechanism. It’s a push-pull kind of thing. Some of our behavior is actually influenced by the environment and some of our behavior is actually influenced by what we are.
"Do we have a choice in defining what we think happiness is, or are we just going to be determined by our culture? It may not be God that is doing the determining, but our culture. And we buy it without thinking.
"Doesn’t it happen some of the time, when you’re reading for a class or studying, there is a certain happiness in the process of seeing and learning and thinking and knowing something new? It’s harder for us to imagine that when we grow up that we’re going to go sit in our library at night, kill the television, and read." -Dr. Cooley
Remember this was only day one; all conclusions about the nature of happiness will be made in the next few weeks.
In case anyone is wondering, I record all my lectures on a digital voice recorder, that way I can listen to them twice (occasionally) and write down all the good parts of the lecture. Well, for some reason I felt compelled to share parts of Dr. Cooley's lecture on happiness because I feel like we're going down the right path with it (I hope I'm not breaking the law). I was so scared the conversation would get trite, but Cooley has led us into a good direction.
James