Happiness: A Worthwhile Purpose in Life

Experts would like to make us believe that there are objective standards in attaining happiness. From such premise, they come with all sorts of math-psychology based models or methodology, e.g. Happiness economics, to ascertain happiness. They attribute happiness mostly to well-being and wealth, from which they justify institutional coercion to supposedly attain such goals.

The fact is that happiness is subjective. Happiness comes from within us, as individuals. Happiness is distinct from person to person. As a state of mind, Happiness revolves around our preferences, value scales and ideals as expressed through expectations, goals and corresponding actions.

This means that happiness have not just been about material things, or about social acceptance or social status but of having a worthwhile purpose in life.

Libertarian author Robert Ringer explains at the Early to Rise 

Happiness has been defined in myriad ways over the centuries by some of the world’s greatest thinkers.  Aristotle described happiness as a condition rather than a destination.  Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to it as a journey.

But I think Viktor Frankl got to the heart of the matter even better when he explained that if there is a reason for happiness, happiness ensues.  Happiness, said Frankl, is a side effect of having a purpose in life.

In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl explained, “What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling of some goal worthy of him.”  In other words, man’s purpose in life is not to achieve goals, but to constantly strive toward them…

Why people look for issues to represent them:

Regardless of whether protest marches have to do with world peace, eradicating poverty, or saving whales from extinction, the reality is that they do not fill the void inherent in a meaningless life.  If man were to succeed in ridding the world of all disease, poverty, pestilence, famine, and war, what then would be the purpose of his existence?

As the struggle for man’s day-to-day survival has increasingly subsided, an important question has emerged:  survival for what?  In other words, just having the means to live is not enough; a person must have something to live for…

Finding your life’s purpose:

And if there is no purpose to an individual’s life — no meaning — then there’s no reason even to get out of bed in the morning, no reason to be alive.  In the words of the great Albert Einstein, “The man who regards his life as meaningless is not merely unhappy, but hardly fit for life.”

The more I reflect on the question, and the more I draw from my own experience and the experiences of others, the more convinced I am that striving toward goals is not a means to an end; striving is an end in itself.  Those who wish their lives away in anticipation of achieving some long-awaited goal do themselves a grave disservice…

The fact is that it’s possible to achieve all your goals in life, yet miss out on life itself.  And the best insurance policy against that happening is to have a worthwhile purpose in life and live in the present.

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