Key to happiness

It’s strange that people don’t realize how they carry the burden of accumulation by missing the freedom of non-accumulation. We have come to human life on a visa for a limited number of years, which generally does not exceed 120 years. Yet we accumulate as if we are green card holders and going to stay here forever.

The problem is that we are so obsessed with this world that we remain completely ignorant of our true nature. It is like a rich person having a lot of wealth forgets the keys to his home and roams around to earn some money to survive. The solution to this misery just finding the key to the home. However, rather than trying to find the key to the home, we spend our entire lives making efforts to accumulate the resources. The more we accumulate, the more we become miserable.

There are two reasons for this misery of accumulation. First, life is for exploration. The more effort we put in to accumulate wealth, power, and positions, the more we miss the fun to explore. The deficiency of this fun makes life meaningless. Secondly, the more we gather and accumulate wealth, power, and connections, the more we realize the futility of the same. They have huge maintenance costs on our time, with no commensurate benefits. Repetition does not give us joy. The first time we go abroad, it was quite enjoyable. If we go regularly there, it becomes a pain. Accumulation can merely facilitate this repetition of these comforts, which loses its value after a point in time. 

Since we have already spent a significant portion of our life, time, and energy accumulating these resources, our minds are not able to accept that we have wasted our lives. We somehow try to prove ourselves right and the more we try to prove that, the more fake we become. This is the reason that old age people are often more frustrated with their lives. At a young age, firstly, we do not realize the futility of these possessions and accumulations. Secondly, even if we realize, we have life to correct the course of life.

The question arises: how can we find the lost key? It’s very simple. We have to just observe ourselves and be aware of our habit patterns. If we analyze our motivations, objectively, we will soon realize that many of them are already out of context. For example, there is a great value of money when we are starving or struggling for basic necessities. Money no longer carries the same value when we get sufficient to meet our basic necessities. The marginal value of the money significantly reduces. However, due to the habit patterns of childhood, we fail to make the mental adjustment to its value in our life and keep running after the same throughout life which makes life meaningless.

Similarly, power and connections have great value while we live in a society where systems are not well in place. When we move to a systemic society, these connections and power have very little value. Similarly, after a threshold of these connections and power, they have very little marginal utility and huge maintenance costs on our time. It makes no sense to invest time and energy in their pursuit. Since we are not aware, we continue to live with this habit pattern. We waste a lot of time and energy in establishing and maintaining these powers and connections that have very little value. This waste of time and energy makes us feel that life is purposeless or meaningless. 

If we further observe, we will soon realize that all these motivations to accumulate wealth, power and connections have certain functional utility. These help us survive better. However, that alone can not be the purpose of life. If we observe ourselves and ask the right questions ourselves, we will see that we become happy when we explore something new. Meeting with friends to discuss new topics gives us joy and not the repetition of the same things. We don’t go to the same place to visit again and again as a tourist. We do not go to eat food in the same restaurant again and again. We get bored with the same assignment after a number of years.

Once we realize these two: the diminishing marginal utility of the accumulations and the fact that we remain happy while exploring new things, we become conscious while making our choices to use time and energy. Our existing fixations with these accumulations drop automatically. We start becoming aware while setting new motivations. We start discriminating between the accumulations that have high marginal utility for us and those with low marginal utility. We do not waste much time and energy on accumulation with low marginal utility. This gives us some free time to explore. 

As awareness becomes a habit, we realize that we already have all the happiness back home. We stop running after happiness. Exploration becomes our motivation. We come out of the home to explore the world and not to search for happiness. Happiness is already with us all the time. Happiness is our true nature. The key has always been with us. We just forgot where we kept the keys. With awareness, we recall the lost happiness.