(August 28, 2021 at 6:18 pm)Spongebob Wrote: I haven't studied Taoism. But I have Buddhism. Happiness isn't really related to Buddhism either unless you associate contentment and peace with happiness. It becomes difficult to nail down. In many ways I think of happiness as a very modern invention.
When I think about people relieving themselves of unhappy thoughts, depression, anxiety and so forth, there is most certainly an aspect of relief and contentment. Just getting that shit off your back can feel like you're airborne. I don't really consider this happiness but I don't undervalue it. I have personal experience with this.
Bolding mine.
What are you defining as happiness? Because I do consider the things you mentioned to be happiness.
I put happiness on a scale AND consider it a fluctuating state that comes and goes. I can have a miserable job situation, getting abuse from customers, working with people I dislike. Yet I can consider myself happy not only over all, because of a measure of tolerance for bad situations (there's a difference between feeling stressed and emotionally abused by your workplace and just feeling unfulfilled by it in different aspects; the latter can make me uncomfortable but I can tolerate not liking my job in that way whereas the former would be the line where I'd define myself as consistently unhappy). But I can also find happiness states in moments. Like the security that comes from being able to pay bills and live without worrying so much. The occasional customer relationships where I feel like I'm making a difference or the regulars who know me and seek me out that make all the bad/rude ones vanish from my mind. I can have good moments offwork that bring me peace and fulfillment (sometimes a job is just a job. Not everything you do for work will satisfy your ambitions and dreams and you can have those things fulfilled outside of work).
So, it's a scale, of these small moments of happiness and pleasure in life adding up to an overall definition of each day collectively. But the state isn't permanent. And it is also defined by the absence of harsher situations and pain, which are also on a scale(like, a bad day here and there is not going to tip the scale even if those bad days are really terrible and make me unhappy for the whole day in question).
