Don't go chasing waterfalls

When the context comes up--and it always comes up in any class that I teach--I remind students that they can go to a Walmart and buy whatever they can afford to, or shop online for whatever that they can afford to ... but, no retailer sells at any price something that we often talk about--happiness.

I know that my point won't register on 99.9999 percent of young people.  I am pretty darn confident that a 20-year old me would have internally chuckled at such a comment from an old, bald, and bearded man.  But, every once in a while I make such comments in class because, well, it is my responsibility.

Ok, ok, the 20-year old me was really concerned about such issues.

By then, I had read a few works of literature in order to understand life and happiness.  I was blown away with the simple and powerful opener that Leo Tolstoy had in Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  Charles Dickens and Somerset Maugham provided me with plenty to think about.  And so did Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  When helping my parents clean out their old place, I came across my old friend:

All those, in addition to the Tamil literature, and the little bit of Hindu philosophy that I had picked up, gave me insights into life.  And I now distill all those when I make those remarks to students.  Too bad if they don't want to pay attention to this bald old man!

These are also why I have always been puzzled by the American idea of the pursuit of happiness.  How can one pursue happiness?  "To constantly pursue something you can never catch is a form of madness."  I know for certain that I don't pursue it.

In practice, our strategies for finding happiness are usually self-defeating. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that much of what we do to gain happiness doesn’t pay off. It seems that aiming at happiness is always a misconceived project; happiness comes, as John Stuart Mill insisted, as the unintended outcome of aiming at something else. “The right to the pursuit of happiness,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.”

Yet, we fool ourselves into the pursuit of happiness, and "the pursuit of happiness gave birth to the consumer society."

Thomas Jefferson lived in a world of slavery and pervasive inequality; he knew perfectly well that the world was not as it ought to be. But he believed, rightly, that a world in which people were free to pursue happiness would be one in which liberty would slowly spread, until all could benefit from it. ... But there is an important difference between us and the founding fathers. They saw life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the alternative to despotism and intolerance. We now can see that a society devoted to self-gratification may, in the end, destroy the conditions of its own existence.

It has been a short descent from the idea of "the pursuit of happiness" to Instagram.