The Pocket Philosopher
The Pocket Philosopher
Happiness and Habits Ch. 1
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Happiness and Habits Ch. 1

10,000 Things
2

“A sick [person] only wants one thing, a healthy [person] wants 10,000 things.”

Confucius

All this week we’ll be revisiting a favorite topic here at TPP, only with a fresh lens. 

That topic is Happiness

We’re going to build each letter on the next, creating a story arc that I hope delights and surprises each of us. 

In many ways, this week will be an effort to break down this elusive state called happiness to its constituent parts, and ask what makes the whole of a person truly happy. 

I grew up in philosophical circles—both fundamentalist and militaristic in nature—in which happiness was considered a selfish ambition, without question. 

Perhaps on some level, you can relate. 

There were so many other things more important than personal happiness—sacrifice, honor, mission, purpose, love of god, obedience. 

This approach to life feels a bit upside down in retrospect. 

“Don’t expect happiness, do your what is expected of you, and leave the world a better place”—so the story goes. After all, selflessness and sacrifice is the key to building the world we all want, right?

The result was community based around ideas, theories, and often mythologies in which we collectively served the heroes. And taking time to gain self knowledge was considered evil, a waste of time, if not a downright dangerous pursuit. 

To flesh it out a little further, I recently came across an online ad of sorts for a religious group which read, 

“God says believe in me, Satan says believe in yourself.” 

Without getting pulled too deep into the intricacies of what this might mean, on the surface the message is clear: Godly people sacrifice a sense of self for a greater cause, and people who believe in themselves and know themselves follow Satan. 

We also see this type of behavior mimicked in films, stories, and in our daily life to a lesser extent. It’s what we demand of our caretakers, for example. We insist, on the other hand, our leaders care more about others than their personal wants or dreams—even if its’ not true. Many of us are often afraid to impose our own desires or will on the world out of conditioned fear. 

We see this commonly acted out in gender dynamics and classism—certain folks are considered undesirable for harboring ambition and self-knowledge while we secretly demand it from others.  

But, to return to our Confucian quote, a sick person only wants one thing. 

Getting to that one thing can be tricky, to say the least. 

Join us tomorrow where we’ll discover what finding your one thing looks like, especially if asking what you want at all is a new exercise.

Until then,

Matt

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
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The Pocket Philosopher
The Pocket Philosopher
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