Many people pursue happiness by way of securing more and more valuable external resources, like money, reputation, social status, power, and so on. It is commonly believed that success consists of these things. People would measure success in terms of how much they own in comparison to others. This way, they can stand out and receive higher social recognition. A feeling of “superior” has been the central goal of life for many of us.
However, despite these external valuable stuff that makes us happy and enjoy a sense of achievement, we could also become vulnerable precisely because of them. A simple law is that how much happiness you enjoy when you have something is equal to how much pain you will experience when you lose it. In general, it is extremely difficult for human beings to bear up to the pain of losing. We become so vulnerable because we are so afraid of the pain of not having something we value so much. This can be losing money, losing fame, losing power, and so on. We tend to hold tightly to whatever we value most so that we would not suffer from the pain of losing.
If we prioritize the external as our primary happiness resource, over time we would attach ourselves to this external stuff, be it money, status, power, etc. These eventually become part of our identity. For example, if we are living a life with a huge sum of money, we tend to think that this is just our life. If one day we lose it, we would no longer afford the lifestyle we once have enjoyed. The pain can be enormous. To maintain our lifestyle would require us to maintain the money, and our happiness is totally dependent on it. We become fearful of losing because we fear so badly that our life is going so much worse than the past.
This also applies to all the other external resources. Since they are external, we could probably lose control of them. To avoid the worst case of losing, we probably fight so hard to maintain it. However, simply maintaining it won’t bring us more happiness, no matter much energy or efforts it takes. Since we prioritize the external as the source of happiness, we become happy only when we gain more and more of it. So we not only need to fight hard to avoid losing it, but we also need to fight hard to gain more. This procedure goes on and on. And we’ll spend most of the time suffering from the fear of losing, and as we gain more, we become more and more vulnerable.
So if we can think carefully about the myth of working hard to gain more, we would probably have a second opinion on it. Life is not just the external, however attractive they are. Keep in mind this simple life lesson. We’ll explore more about it in future posts.
