Paradox of Happiness


Distributed Team Work, the new term (not remote work or work from home) Is the new norm and, infrastructure issues notwithstanding, teams have become lot more productive. CFOs must be seriously pondering on moving towards this distributed teams globally, saving on office space and travel!  I suspect most companies are experiencing this productivity gain, resulting in higher profit margins reflected in earnings through coming quarters, augmented with the $2T dollars printed by US Fed … stocks will certainly go up. This is my optimistic view …

 

Optimism makes us happy … and what is happiness … as you guessed, it is the 'state of the mind'!

 

The responses for my last post ranged from 'what is this' to 'please keep sending me this useless information.. Didn't know you can write useless things too’. Abraham Flexner, who founded the institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, that housed folks such as Einstein, Godel, in 1939, wrote a paper on Usefulness of Useless information - so that geniuses can connect disconnected streams of thinking into their theories. So … you must take pride in reading this useless information!

 

Here is to you … the useless information on Paradox of Happiness. 


Sometimes strange initiatives get kicked off in large organizations with a initiative lead ... one recent one I can attest to is - 'how to make engineers happy'. That got me thinking into how the initiative lead is planning on possessing these godly superpowers in making anyone happy, let alone software engineers!

 

Thomas Jefferson agonized on, should it be 'inalienable right for pursuit of happiness' or the 'right to happiness' - and concluded that state shouldn’t be driving people happy, but the individual has the right to pursue happiness. And over thousands of years, philosophers such as Epicurus, defined happiness as freedom from fear (ataraxia) and freedom from pain (aponia). Of course, religions took ground and advocated 'fear from fear'… resulting in only drunkards remembering Epicurus … or shall we say, he is the god of drinking.

 

Anthropologists have been debating whether the modern human in a self-driving Tesla, is happier than the hunter gatherer of 50,000 years ago or the 'kibbutz style' families of 5000 years ago. Happiness is a biochemical state of the mind - DOSE - dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins, in a certain balance create happiness. And this balance does not occur all the time - resulting in external symptoms such as stress which we relate to work or that colleague that is a major pain in the ass … causing one to ruminate and not be present in time.

 

To address this issue, humans have tried many substances that modulate this biochemical balance, knowingly or unknowingly, as Rhubarb, Soma and others from 5000 years ago, resulting in 1% of global trade today in narcotics. And with synthetic biology, one can grow these substances by farming cells in a lab.

 

But then, evolution is based on the survival of the fittest… if there was ever one that is always happy, then it is likely that those human's genes never made it to future generations, thus taking away the always happy genetic genes away from circulation. So - the bottom line is, evolution forces humans with their natural instincts to expand beyond their comfort zones, experience and learn new things and in the process, disrupting the biochemical balance from happiness to stress and on-going cycle. 

 

The paradox of happiness is that there is no such thing as 'nirvana happiness'… if that were the case, humans would not have progressed ... we would not have been here.

 

Let us drink to the god of drinking, Epicurus.

 

Enjoy!

[of course, I made up some of the stuff above… ]

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