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The irony is that you won't discover happiness until you realize that there isn't such a thing as happiness. Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive a

The irony is that you won't discover happiness until you realize that there isn't such a thing as happiness. Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be. It's ironic because this encourages people to use the scientific method to delude themselves into thinking that eternal bliss is possible. I actually implemented something like this. I used to keep a detailed diary of the things that have happened and I used to analyze the shit out of everything on paper and then I would check the conclusions and do it again, but somehow it never worked. Upon hitting this I would blame myself and everything I've touched for it. Clearly there has to be something wrong with me , but what I failed to realize was that I was fooling myself in the most logical manner possible. It's amazing how twisted things are. Although, this concept will help you to evaluate things and get things done. It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can.

Jach 16y ago
> Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be. While I don't disagree with your message overall, this statement stood out as being quite odd. Why should we have misery and pain?
- todayiamme 16y ago
  I read a story about the Buddha as a kid and I never got it until a few days ago. Once Buddha meets a woman in pain because her new-born child had died. She begs him to bring him back to life and he agrees provided she could get him a handful of rice from a house without death. Needless to say she couldn't find such a place. The point is that eternal bliss would be such a wonderful thing, but it doesn't exist anymore than perpetual motion does. Let's face it everything alive today on this earth during this very second in which you have read these words will die. I am an atheist to the core and I will remain an atheist to the core. I don't think that there are any angels, or heaven or some kind of hell out there. I know that the only thing out there is emptiness. There is no doubt about it, and that's the beauty of it. By accepting the fact that nothing truly ever lasts we can prepare ourselves for peace. It's a really twisted concept that I can't explain in words, but whenever you see the truth that happiness is not just another shot away then you don't crave for things. You don't seek to replace the pain with something else. All you do is focus on just being and that opens the doors for everything else. You learn to love and create for the sake of doing just that. You see beyond yourself and you actually care about other people. Most importantly you realize that just like life learning is a process that will never end till the day you die. It's amazing. I hope that you understand.
  - Ardit20 16y ago
    It is indeed amazing, but the answer can be simpler. Without pain, there is no such thing as not pain. You need to feel what pain is, so that you know what it feels like to not have pain. If we all were in some sort of utopia, or heaven, we would be dead bored. Life is good because we keep learning and in pain there is much learning which is different from the learning one acquires when not in pain. If there was only one state of being, there would not be many opportunities for growth. In life however there are many states of being between absolute pain and absolute not pain which gives one so much room for growth and learning and also variety for everyone to be unique in their own way. Once one stops learning however, everything is familiar, and eventually, boring. Which is why the concept of heaven or hell is attractive at first, but only because we are not in heaven or hell. It is like buying those gorgeous trousers you wanted, or car, which eventually becomes just a pair of trousers or just a car. So too with heaven, if it existed, it would be great in the first days or week or month, but in a year you would get dead bored of it and want to move to America again :P
  - Jach 16y ago
    I understand, I've read various texts of Eastern philosophy and I enjoy the benefits of being able to let go at times, but I was really hoping for a different argument than this one and the similar one given by Ardit. I can imagine a world without pain, and a world without death (at least a world where people live a lot longer than 75 years, I won't argue for some physics that lets us live forever), and if I were a member of that world instead of this one, nothing you two have said would convince me to say "Yeah, pain and death are great, I want some of that. I need some of that!" Similar arguments have also been made for trying Meth and the like, that you just have to experience it! No thanks. I also don't buy the whole "You need pain to experience happiness", but I haven't formulated an eloquent knockdown argument against that yet. While it's true pain and pleasure are related through endorphins, my idea of happiness isn't constant orgasm. I've wondered if these arguments for pain could simply be using an overly broad definition of pain that includes any struggle or conflict, any challenge or exercise... Being for death, especially if you're an atheist, is just ludicrous. Anyway, I can also imagine being very not-bored in such a different world that knows no pain nor death for very many years, longer than any lifetime any human has yet had. I can imagine that in that world where life is valued oh-so-high, that people are constantly at work to increase it, to let people live even just one more day. I can imagine learning for the sake of learning and creating for the sake of creating, I can imagine doing those things for other ends as well, some selfish, some not. The brain pattern making up "you" is fairly unique, and it's such a sad shame, a true shame, that so many patterns have already been annihilated even before a mere 75 years have passed. There may be nothing out there that says your matter's state is worth preserving, but there is definitely something in here. In human brains. Unfortunately our brains were built by the ancestral environment, not by any benevolent being, and thus we have certain problems such as this contradiction of sometimes believing death and pain are things acceptable, even good, yet nonetheless having a very strong aversion to death and pain. I think the aversion is the saner part of our minds.
Sumason 16y ago
"Although, this concept will help you to evaluate things and get things done. It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can." Sounds just a liiiiiittle to depressing for me. While I admit that your not going to be %100 happy all of the time, do you not find that there are moments when your in bliss? Also I found that economic concepts do a pretty good job predicting happiness for myself. They're not going to be perfect (obviously), but I would say that I'm reasonable happy with my life using the simple concept of diminishing returns and returns to scale.
DeusExMachina 16y ago
It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can. Really? I don't agree with this. Reaching happiness is hard, indeed. Impossible? Not at all. Go around and look for happy people, you can find them, in different parts of the world. Personally, now I'm on average happier than I was some years ago. Happiness is a long journey and one of the first big steps is to realize what really makes you happy. People delude themselves they would be happy in certain situations, but they are usually wrong. This is something that prevents people from being happy. But if you spend enough time growing, looking inside yourself to what is really important to you and learn to enjoy the journey too, you can be happy. This at least is my experience and I think is enough to refute your final statement. But there are better experiences out there than mine. Probably some pain and problems will always be part of your life, but unless pain pervades all your life and is just occasional, you can be happy.
psnj 16y ago
> [...] there isn't such a thing as happiness. > Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be. Is it not possible that there is happiness, but also misery and pain? I've felt both. Is happiness "achieved"? Or "encountered"? "momentarily brushed-up against"? "allowed"? In any case I think an approach like TTL's is worth trying: nowhere do they say "that eternal bliss is possible". It seems they're just trying to help people make things better for themselves.
jasonmorton 16y ago
Happiness is the sensation of gradient ascent.

Jach 16y ago

> Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be. While I don't disagree with your message overall, this statement stood out as being quite odd. Why should we have misery and pain?

todayiamme 16y ago
I read a story about the Buddha as a kid and I never got it until a few days ago. Once Buddha meets a woman in pain because her new-born child had died. She begs him to bring him back to life and he agrees provided she could get him a handful of rice from a house without death. Needless to say she couldn't find such a place. The point is that eternal bliss would be such a wonderful thing, but it doesn't exist anymore than perpetual motion does. Let's face it everything alive today on this earth during this very second in which you have read these words will die. I am an atheist to the core and I will remain an atheist to the core. I don't think that there are any angels, or heaven or some kind of hell out there. I know that the only thing out there is emptiness. There is no doubt about it, and that's the beauty of it. By accepting the fact that nothing truly ever lasts we can prepare ourselves for peace. It's a really twisted concept that I can't explain in words, but whenever you see the truth that happiness is not just another shot away then you don't crave for things. You don't seek to replace the pain with something else. All you do is focus on just being and that opens the doors for everything else. You learn to love and create for the sake of doing just that. You see beyond yourself and you actually care about other people. Most importantly you realize that just like life learning is a process that will never end till the day you die. It's amazing. I hope that you understand.
- Ardit20 16y ago
  It is indeed amazing, but the answer can be simpler. Without pain, there is no such thing as not pain. You need to feel what pain is, so that you know what it feels like to not have pain. If we all were in some sort of utopia, or heaven, we would be dead bored. Life is good because we keep learning and in pain there is much learning which is different from the learning one acquires when not in pain. If there was only one state of being, there would not be many opportunities for growth. In life however there are many states of being between absolute pain and absolute not pain which gives one so much room for growth and learning and also variety for everyone to be unique in their own way. Once one stops learning however, everything is familiar, and eventually, boring. Which is why the concept of heaven or hell is attractive at first, but only because we are not in heaven or hell. It is like buying those gorgeous trousers you wanted, or car, which eventually becomes just a pair of trousers or just a car. So too with heaven, if it existed, it would be great in the first days or week or month, but in a year you would get dead bored of it and want to move to America again :P
- Jach 16y ago
  I understand, I've read various texts of Eastern philosophy and I enjoy the benefits of being able to let go at times, but I was really hoping for a different argument than this one and the similar one given by Ardit. I can imagine a world without pain, and a world without death (at least a world where people live a lot longer than 75 years, I won't argue for some physics that lets us live forever), and if I were a member of that world instead of this one, nothing you two have said would convince me to say "Yeah, pain and death are great, I want some of that. I need some of that!" Similar arguments have also been made for trying Meth and the like, that you just have to experience it! No thanks. I also don't buy the whole "You need pain to experience happiness", but I haven't formulated an eloquent knockdown argument against that yet. While it's true pain and pleasure are related through endorphins, my idea of happiness isn't constant orgasm. I've wondered if these arguments for pain could simply be using an overly broad definition of pain that includes any struggle or conflict, any challenge or exercise... Being for death, especially if you're an atheist, is just ludicrous. Anyway, I can also imagine being very not-bored in such a different world that knows no pain nor death for very many years, longer than any lifetime any human has yet had. I can imagine that in that world where life is valued oh-so-high, that people are constantly at work to increase it, to let people live even just one more day. I can imagine learning for the sake of learning and creating for the sake of creating, I can imagine doing those things for other ends as well, some selfish, some not. The brain pattern making up "you" is fairly unique, and it's such a sad shame, a true shame, that so many patterns have already been annihilated even before a mere 75 years have passed. There may be nothing out there that says your matter's state is worth preserving, but there is definitely something in here. In human brains. Unfortunately our brains were built by the ancestral environment, not by any benevolent being, and thus we have certain problems such as this contradiction of sometimes believing death and pain are things acceptable, even good, yet nonetheless having a very strong aversion to death and pain. I think the aversion is the saner part of our minds.

Sumason 16y ago

"Although, this concept will help you to evaluate things and get things done. It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can." Sounds just a liiiiiittle to depressing for me. While I admit that your not going to be %100 happy all of the time, do you not find that there are moments when your in bliss? Also I found that economic concepts do a pretty good job predicting happiness for myself. They're not going to be perfect (obviously), but I would say that I'm reasonable happy with my life using the simple concept of diminishing returns and returns to scale.

DeusExMachina 16y ago

It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can. Really? I don't agree with this. Reaching happiness is hard, indeed. Impossible? Not at all. Go around and look for happy people, you can find them, in different parts of the world. Personally, now I'm on average happier than I was some years ago. Happiness is a long journey and one of the first big steps is to realize what really makes you happy. People delude themselves they would be happy in certain situations, but they are usually wrong. This is something that prevents people from being happy. But if you spend enough time growing, looking inside yourself to what is really important to you and learn to enjoy the journey too, you can be happy. This at least is my experience and I think is enough to refute your final statement. But there are better experiences out there than mine. Probably some pain and problems will always be part of your life, but unless pain pervades all your life and is just occasional, you can be happy.

psnj 16y ago

> [...] there isn't such a thing as happiness. > Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be. Is it not possible that there is happiness, but also misery and pain? I've felt both. Is happiness "achieved"? Or "encountered"? "momentarily brushed-up against"? "allowed"? In any case I think an approach like TTL's is worth trying: nowhere do they say "that eternal bliss is possible". It seems they're just trying to help people make things better for themselves.

jasonmorton 16y ago

Happiness is the sensation of gradient ascent.