Happiness is pleasure and meaning

Business, law, medicine, engineering. These are noble pursuits, necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love. These are what we are alive for.

- John Keating

John Keating said this in Dead Poet’s Society, and I was pondering over it after I watched the show on DVD over the weekend.

Many of us have asked ourselves, “What do I live for?” or “What do I want to do in life?” I’m often perturbed by the same questions.

What are we alive for? Just to sustain life? For results? For achievements?

We are alive to be happy. And I incidentally found a book on happiness, by Tal Ben-Shahar, a professor currently teaching positive psychology at Harvard. He describes happiness as pleasure in the short term, and meaning in the long term. And for us to be really happy in life, we have to engage in activities that give us pleasure in the short term, and meaning in he long term.

This means that while getting a gold for your fitness will give you short term happiness, you may go through a lot of unhappy moments during training because you did not truly believe in the benefits of keeping your body fit. However, if you truly believe in fitness, you would feel happy training for marathons and ironman challenges, and also enjoy the process of participating in these events, even if you do not come in first. This is where meaning comes into play.

There are many things we do now that we don’t enjoy (like all those compulsory modules in school), and many things we enjoy that we are not doing (like more KTV). Its always such a struggle to find the perfect combination. I wish I knew what I was doing. Do you?