Is the “pursuit of happiness” an existential futility?
Is the “pursuit of happiness” an existential futility? Perhaps happiness emerges from fulfillment of your choice and execution of your perceived duty to life. You choose your duty. And by delivering on it, happiness follows.
That’s a lesson for hard times.
Consider the short verse by Rabindranath Tagore — the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s onetime conversation partner in contemplating science and spirituality, and a man who thought deeply about human nature:
“I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was duty.
I worked — and behold,
duty was joy.”
In consonance with Camus’s view of happiness as a moral obligation — an outcome to be attained not through direct pursuit but as a byproduct of living with authenticity and integrity — Frankl reflects on Tagore’s poetic point:
“So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down.”
Reading philosophy has always helped me during the toughest of times when there seemed to be no straightforward answers.
Inspired from: Moshe Vardi
