Whose happiness is it anyway

A little long ago, I used to think that people should do what makes them happy, and that when everyone does the same, the world is going to be a happy place. But when I later realized the inherent flaw in this logic, I felt timid. How ignorant was it to assume that the world will have the maximum happiness if everyone does everything that gives him or her the maximum happiness!

With due respect to the concepts of free will, I will have to acknowledge that they are so alluring that you will be enticed to believe that individual happiness is the way to collective harmony. But then, it takes a little bit of extrospection, if I may be allowed to construct that word, to realize that the other way around may perhaps be a possibility, but pure individual happiness may not lead to collective harmony.

So, does everyone have to sacrifice own happiness for the bigger harmony? In some cases, they may be sacrifices that are worth making, but in most cases they may not be sacrifices in the first place. I can give you a few examples. If you think stopping on a red light is making you unhappy, then there is some problem with you, not with the system. If you think not coaching a junior is the best way to ensure your own safety, you've got the fundamentals of ecosystem wrong, the ecosystem itself is not wrong. If you think blocking imports is the best way to grow trade inside the country, it's again a problem with your understanding of economics, not with economics itself.

Before the examples get more complex, if you have still not learnt to derive self-happiness out of keeping the system happy, then I think it's you who has to grow before the system can start growing again. If you believed individual happiness comes before collective harmony, think again, you might be cutting off the branch on which you're sitting. There might be many ways to not have individual happiness while upholding collective harmony, but there may be at least one way for each one of us to ensure both. After all, the system comprises of all of us. The question is not about whose happiness it is, the question is, whose happiness is it anyway?

The balance, the poise and the equilibrium

My blog is essentially "my take on life", as a friend of mine used to describe. Many of my posts are born out of some lateral thinking spun from an agreement or a disagreement I would have with worldly affairs, or just sprouted out of an experience, an observation or a discussion. But there are some posts that are all of these. This is one such post. I seem to suddenly be relating this to everything, everywhere. In fact this entire post is taken out of what I wrote somewhere else. 

 

Contrary to the popular adage that claims you cannot both have the cake and eat it, there is a balance you can mostly strike with everything in life. This balance is not exactly like eating half and having half, but this is almost like having as well as eating. For example, you can be patient for success as well as be impatient for progress, you can be responsible with age as well as be sparkling with childhood, you can be serious at your job as well as be playful with your people. And you can apply this to your integration with the society too - you can very well be adhering to the societal norms as well as be protesting them in your thoughts, you can follow a rule as well as break it, you can be very similar to the rest of the people as well as be very different. 

 

Maybe there are hundred ways to not be all of these together, but I feel there is at least one way for each of us to be all of these and still be ourselves. We do strike this balance with most things in life, just that we don't notice, and consequently fail to extend it to the rest of the things. Think about the clothes we wear. Do we wear it for the world or for ourselves? Both - we cover ourselves up, but we wear what we like. 

 

Imagining it poetically, I feel each of us lives in two worlds - one inside and the other outside. The inside world is for us, we can include only the things and people we want to. And then there is the real world where we have to operate within the reigns. But once we realize the freedom within ourselves and the harmony we need to create outside, it's only a matter of time before we can expand this inner space and accept that the inside world is just part of the outside world. The acceptance already means that we're happy both being ourselves in our world and being like how others want us to be in the outside world. 

 

It may look like a trade off, but it's actually a balance, a balance on limits that keep expanding as we know more, learn more and grow more. It is this balance and poise that, I feel, could give us the equilibrium that we would not want to miss.