Terrible, terrible things: happiness and growth

At least as we know and think of them in the common sense. If you are seeking happiness, do not seek it in growth of your assets or material achievements. Once you have enough to get by, happiness- the long lasting kind- is found elsewhere. The only exception is when your wealth is directly used to improve the lives of other people who do not have enough to get by on their own. That is the inner, deep happiness that arises from sharing, giving, enabling and helping.

Why do we confuse happiness with growth?

In the modern world, growth has become a byword for happiness and contentment. It is worth examining how this has happened.

1. Primal drives don't have an automatic off-switch.

Accumulating things is part of our innate primal drives. Possessions denote security, power, and insurance against loss or famine. When we get something, we feel a brief thrill of happiness, but this quickly wanes and we are back wanting more.

The primal mind is not accustomed to believing that we have enough. For most of our existence on earth, our species faced a lack of things. We learned to accumulate because this helped us to survive. Because this state was ever-present, we have not evolved to a state where this primal drive automatically switches off. If we don't attend to it mindfully, it stays on. We keep wanting more.

2. Growth has become necessary in order to stay afloat.

One of the imperfections of the modern capital system is that we need to grow just to keep what we have. When money is borrowed, it needs to be paid back, plus a bit more. That extra bit keeps us on the treadmill: we must create more wealth than we originally borrowed, or face losing what we have worked for so far. This system makes it inherently difficult to stop. Even if we think we have enough, we need to keep going. Contentment is no longer attainable from being at rest.

Even if we don't borrow, we face ongoing expenses to stay afloat; the comforts we enjoy must all be paid for by subscription to providers who supply us with those comforts, be they our homes, electricity, water, or food. Our primal drives further conspire to make us believe that we must have better, grander, lifestyles. We associate with good people, hard working normal people, who have bought into the same misleading idea. We get higher paid jobs that demand that we live in more expensive places. We confuse short term elation from status and material comforts, with long term contentment. The subscription price to life increases when we keep aspiring without insight into what makes us happier in the long run.

There is an old saying, I don't know where it comes from. "If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people who he gives it to".

In my career, I have met and worked with people from the extreme ends of the spectrum. As as psychiatrist in inner city UK, I met a guy who was literally homeless, whose main anxiety arose from how to prevent other homeless people in his locale from stealing his few precious possessions from where he slept. As a coach, I have worked with a self-made man of immense wealth with whose considerable anxiety arose from how he could possibly feel secure or respected in his community if he was not yet a billionaire.

Between the two, I can genuinely say that although the rich guy was happier with his life, he was not millions of times happier by any means. He was happier because he was safer, better provided for, and didn't have urgent concerns for his immediate future. In truth, if the homeless guy had a decent house and an income that provided for his basic needs, he had as many ingredients for being happy as the millionaire.

What can we learn from this?

Happiness- that long-lasting contentment, comes from being attentive to your outlook on life.

An attentive mind uses all of its abilities to harmonise itself. Attentiveness to primal drives leads us to be more at peace with them. Attentiveness is as quick as the primal mind, allowing us to interrupt it and suspense its impulses in time to allow some logical intervention. We cannot fight them or snub primal drives: rather, we should thank them for reminding us to be vigilant to our needs.

So, we refer the questioning to our logical mind. The logical mind helps untangle errant beliefs by gentle questioning.

Primal thinking, for example, is:

'I AM ANXIOUS AND UNHAPPY. I NEED SOMETHING'.

Logical questioning leads to the following reflective conversation:

'Thank you for the feeling. You are obviously trying to tell me we need to do something to feel better. Let's look at it logically.'

'I BELIEVE THAT WE NEED X IN ORDER TO BE HAPPY. WE CAN'T HAVE X.

WE NEED IT!'

'Is happiness possible without X?'

'WELL, YES, I GUESS IT IS'

'Are there people without X who are happy?'

'YES, THERE ARE'.

'And are there people with X who are unhappy?'

'YES, THERE ARE'.

'So it is reasonable to believe that X is not the main source of happiness?'

'YES, I SUPPOSE SO.'

'Is it reasonable to say that X would make us happy for a short while only?'

'YES, THAT'S PROBABLY RIGHT. BUT I WANT TO BE HAPPY FOREVER!'

'Ah, that's what's going on. So, what do we know about being happy in the long term. Shall we have a look at our Life Rules? We might get some clues from there'.

'YES, OK, LET'S CHECK OUR LIFE RULES'.

The attentive mind then refers us to our Life Rules. Having a good set of Life Rules serves immense purpose. Life Rules remind us about how to feel centred, calm, and how to conduct ourselves towards goals, how to behave, and how to live a good day from moment to moment.

The attentive mind has a way of negotiating its way round perilous emotions and dubious traps in a way that sees us using all of our mind in a productive and harmonious way. No need for suppression or denial, no need for prolonged, untamed anxiety or self-deprecation. True happiness is about contentment. True growth is from inner growth.