Do we want huge wealth? Do we want great relationships? Do we want freedom? If we really dive deep into what we really want, we’ll realize that we don’t want sportscars, mansions, girlfriends, followers or other fantasies – we want the feeling we get associated with any of these – we want happiness.
If you are facing trouble agreeing to this, just take 10 things you want to have/achieve/do and breakdown to the very core of why you want them, you want to have a suitcase filled with money? You only need happiness that money can bring with purchases– you won’t want the money the moment it’s demonetized. You want a loving and caring boyfriend? You want the happiness of being in a relationship, of having someone to care for you, listen to you. You want to help orphaned children? You want to feel the happiness that comes associated with the act of selflessly helping someone. Happiness can be as little as the desire to be heard. Whatever it is that you want, it ultimately comes down to you wanting the happiness associated with it.
So this is clear that any living being wants nothing but happiness – everything we want is just an attempt to become happy.
You think that the world works with many complicated systems and policies? How the world works is actually pretty fundamental and patterned. The 5 principles the world works on , under the theory of happiness are – Hierarchy, Command, Comparison, Mistakes and Conflicts.
Now that we know what we actually want, it becomes pretty easy to understand how everything works. We chase happiness and more happiness eventually. This chase of happiness is a matter of individual capability (happiness is not a chase, it is a natural state but the pursuit of more happiness is a never-ending chase). In this chase people with more capabilities acquire higher positions in the social hierarchy by providing happiness (what everyone wants) to people below them. It can be a businessman acquiring position of respect by creating a valuable product for consumers, it can be a politician making positive policies for the welfare of the people – when someone provides happiness to the other people, the person gets selected by them as higher individual (this is how hierarchy works).
At the macro level – Fame and Respect are the biggest forms of happiness. This comes from acquiring higher positions in the hierarchy and higher position in the hierarchy is achieved by providing happiness to other people and making them believe that you are capable of providing them with more happiness. Chasing fame and respect, people acquire positions of command over people and start organizing the people (Businessmen organizing their market, Ministers organizing effect of their ministry, Influencers organizing impact on their audience).
At the micro level – Love, Security, Enjoyment, Entertainment, peace, etc are the forms of individual happiness. The ones chasing the macro forms of happiness provide for these micro forms of happiness and very soon win command over the people on the conditions of trust that they will keep receiving more happiness under their command.
This happiness-and-trust relationship creates world leaders and commanders who go on to organize people onto their systems and beliefs. It works on supply and demand of happiness in material and mental forms.
Both at the macro and the micro level people compare their level of happiness to the others’ (happiness is a common state but people have imaginary “quantity of happiness”). This comparison soon leads to competition which forces people to find ways to ways to increase their “Quantity of happiness”, wanting it to be more than that of the other people.
Competition makes sure that the civilization doesn’t stop innovating and developing but also creates a comparative “lack of happiness”. The people wanting to fill their “lack of happiness” often take wrong decisions and make mistakes in hurry or under influence. These mistakes cause changes in hierarchical positions at the macro level and personal image at the micro level – both of which give opportunity for someone else to jump above them and get to better positions.
Increment in hierarchy occurs both out of one’s betterment through comparison and the other’s decrement through mistakes. This change in hierarchy ensures freshness of innovation and development of oneself.
Now different hierarchy organizations have different sets of beliefs, products, activities and characteristics. These differences combined with the fierce competition for greater size and power usually turns into mass conflict at the macro and smaller conflicts at the micro level.
These conflicts turn into military wars, social protests, legal battles, etc. Each conflict restructures the hierarchy acquisitions, powers and characteristics of the organizations and people associated with them. Conflicts help winning organizations and people rise to greater power and size. Smaller organizations keep getting bigger by winning bigger and bigger conflicts and beating greater and greater competitions. Same happens for people trying to rise in power.
Happiness is a state, not a chase. The world works on the misconception that happiness is to be chased down and acquired but in reality happiness is an internal state that we live in. Happiness cannot be acquired in any external way or with any material substance. Happiness can be thought of as an energy that is to be radiated and not absorbed. The only actionable measure to radiate happiness is to share this energy with others. It’s very fundamental to the laws of physics – every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When you radiate happiness energy out of you (like a canon launching a cannonball) equal amount of happiness comes back in the opposite direction towards you (like the recoil of the cannon).
You can start harnessing the energy of happiness just by living in it, by creating it sharing it with others, by starting to enjoy your existence and the fact that happiness is the theory of everything and hence the natural state for anything to be in.
Be Happy.