ON BEING HAPPY.

By: Khairi Janbek.

In the ancient world, happiness was a gift of the gods that could be withdrawn any moment. No one imagined it to be the state of mind that could be deliberately pursued and permenantly achieved. When philosophers advocated the pursuit of happiness, they had in mind something quite different from the life of continuous satisfaction that most people seem to want today.

For Aristotle, happiness meant a life spent successfully pursuing things that were valuable in themselves, while for the Epicureans, it signified freedom from inner disturbance- tranquility that could only be achieved by minimising one's desires. The Stoics had a similar view, prizing peace of mind over the satisfaction of any human impulse. Freud, who revived a type of Stoicism in the early decades of the 20th century, confessed that psychoanalysis could do no more than reconcile the patients to the frustration every human being must suffer. As he wrote to a patient " Much will be gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. Having restored your inner life, you'll be better able to arm yourself against that umhappiness".

In all these philosophies, it was taken for granted that, happiness would never be the normal human condition- an attitude that is nowadays condemned as impossibly austere, as well as insufferably patronising. In a sense no one nowadays can question the claim that people are unjustified in seeking a happy life. However and unfortunately, life becomes anxious and miserable, when it is ruled by an obsessive preoccupation with feeling happy.