What it means to care - The utilitarian flaw.

When looking at the definitions of happiness between the classics and the present you will notice the former sees happiness as a way of life, and the latter sees it as a temporary psychological state. Happiness for the ancients was not as we see it now, which a state that comes and goes in life, but happiness is a way we acquire when we live the right way. I believe it is possible to have a happy life by investing in actions that produce long-term rewards we can keep building on. Maybe there is no such thing as the happy life when it comes to the ability to feel good all the time, but a happy life can be one where if we look at the greater scheme of things we find a constant progression of the self. Happiness I believe is not something we get just by going through the motions. People who go through the motions of pragmatism at their job that has always brought them food on the table may be completely miserable even though they found something that works.

It seems happiness has three parts to it. One is finding pragmatic things that work. The second part is to work at new things that cause us to struggle while we subconsciously drill away at old mastered skills. It is odd to think that part of the happiness equation would require struggle. Even peaceful moments where we can be complacent only come about after we have struggled to reach them…and even then they are only temporary. Even if we relaxed all the time we would eventually become bored, depressed, and desire to struggle at something again. Struggle can only be done consciously, and those who struggle the most with success seem to find the most happiness. That is why the skills we have already mastered are like a monkey turning a crank unconsciously. They are no longer a struggle when we have mastered them. They become unconscious like chewing food while we consciously struggle at other things like thinking or working on something. When we are with friends we play, and sometimes the line between work and play is very thin. When we are in a conversation with friends there are many points where we are confronting each other’s beliefs and values. When we are playing active games like sports we struggle over who wins and who has control just as a conversation. Even in play we are working at winning or a goal consciously, and only in these conscious struggles can we improve ourselves. The funny thing is we all think everyday about things, and in many cases we all have thoughts of struggle with something in our lives. Most of these thoughts are struggles we may not be able to overcome. We just like having the ability to dream of overcoming them. The third part to happiness seems to be the ability to understand our true desires as well as knowing how to get those desires. It is getting to taste victory over and over again as a way of life that brings happiness after each struggle while never abstaining from a constant new struggle. Perhaps it is only those who manage to think of pragmatic ways to solve the riddles to some of these dreams in their real lives that actualize and conquer, while the rest just struggle in their thoughts and become depressed with their unchanging situations. They dwell on the past or things that they wish could be, but never seem to think of how to connect the “knowing that” of an idea to a “knowing how” of completing the dream. Happiness can only be found when we see a desire we want, find a pragmatic method to encounter it with, and conquer the desire through struggle to take it for our own. People who can keep achieving this continually throughout life by investing in things they know they can keep struggling and winning at are the ones who find happiness in the classical sense. They find happiness as a way of life. Struggle that is not happy is the kind that never brings a reward like a couple that never finds resolution in conflict or a dream that remains a dream while our real lives remain stagnant.

If we could now superimpose the concept of happiness as a way of life onto caring as a way of understanding we might be able to reach an actualization of our actions and true desires. It is only by understanding our true desires we can understand what we truly care about. If we act on things we do not really care about because we lie to ourselves we only find pragmatic means of struggle over a false desire. Under this method we project our energy and power into an artificial construction of comfort. This is because I believe we are utilitarian creatures by nature. We naturally run from pain and towards pleasure. The flaw in utilitarianism on the personal level is it allows us to lie to ourselves about our true desires. This is because true desire lies behind pain and fear. When we deny the true pleasures we desire and project our energy into the artificial we become insecure and fear fearful covertly. This is the man who puts himself through torture just to be someone’s boyfriend and finds that the relationship is horrible, but lives in denial of the horror just to maintain the label of boyfriend and claims he is a happy man when his struggle brings no rewards. By projecting the energy to care into a label with a particular person that bears no fruit he has given up the desire to be in a happy relationship somewhere else or even be alone happy. Being pragmatic and struggling over broken things that do not bring about our true desires leads to a life of misery. This is just learning how to make broken things work well instead of fixing them. I am sure we could all get good at walking on crutches, but why not get good at walking with a fixed foot? To overcome this utilitarian flaw we have to face fear and conquer it. Some fears are natural for a good reason like running from a hungry lion, but perhaps a lion in a particular situation must be conquered to achieve happiness in our lives. We can only conquer a fear if we care to. The problem is we tend to care about the artificial denial we created in place of the obvious fear that only others can see in us more often than we can. Sometimes it takes dialect with others to point out our fears, but even in these situations we tend to get defensive if we are not ready to see our flaws. Caring is not the ability to look at a problem and acknowledge it alone. Caring is an action we do upon the thing we acknowledge and not just an understanding of it. When we take action to struggle over a problem in a pragmatic manner to solve it we truly care, but this can be fatal if we are acting something that cannot be fixed or if it is an artificial construction we care about. Performing the same action again and again with no reward or result would be insanity. Insanity is a dream we never conquer. True desires exist beneath a series of layers we may never get to the bottom of, but the closer we get the better, and we can only do this when those close to us can see these denials on our surface and help us overcome them. It is only by placing ourselves in environments with people that are conducive to our true desires that we can actually accomplish our true desires. People who are opposed to our desires are only artificial friends we constructed to find pleasure in, in order to avoid the pain covering our true desire that they help us deny we have to achieve them. They will convince us that we do not want to become what we truly desire so we can be dragged down to their level of less accomplishment. This environment is not in our favor and it is only by going to one with friends that support, or an environment where we are alone we can achieve what we desire, but an environment with friends is always more desirable if we can find those that fit our desires.