The Lie of True Happiness that Firefly/Serenity blows away-

POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Sunday, October 3, 2010 01:13
VIEWED: 1792
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CHRISISALL

Wednesday, September 29, 2010 2:54 AM

It's a dopey dream that we ALL have, and one that Joss takes aim at in most of his works IMO.
What IS happiness?

The absence of conflict?
Total acceptance of the *real you* by your lover?
Not getting killed by Reavers?
Not having the *real you* discovered over a volcano?
Having a cool ride with a Capisin 38 engine that WORKS WELL?

IMHO, happiness is accepting that not every moment or day will be, er, HAPPY.

Accepting that people in general can suck- even your loved ones.

That even YOU can suck, on occasion.

I know I can suck.

I must be U-man.

Thoughts?

The laughing Chrisisall

BYTEMITE

Wednesday, September 29, 2010 1:56 PM

Joss Whedon steeps all of his characters in unhappiness from their very design concept. Then he nails them where it hurts.

Yes, even Kaylee. Most of the time she is actually genuinely optimistic and happy, but deep down I see her as troubled by things they have to do and tensions that rise among the crew because of it. Look at the movie when Mal's fighting with everyone, the times when danger comes home. The crew tries to keep her sheltered, but she knows. She tries to justify it, tries to pass it off to Simon in The Train Job as exciting and adventurous, but she's trying to convince herself as much as anyone. Out of Gas, Objects in Space, War Stories, in these episodes, Kaylee is reminded of how dangerous and uncertain life out in space is, as has to try to forget, move past the fear, but she ends up just carrying it with her.

Similarly, Zoe and Wash are a happy couple, but individually, they have their shares of troubles. Zoe's stoicism hides a lot of pain and anger, even more than Mal (judging by her stint with the dust devils), she just doesn't express it outwardly. Wash is a happy-go-lucky guy on the outside, but like Kaylee he has his own concerns about how dangerous their lives are, which is why he kept trying to convince Zoe to LEAVE the ship before they tried to start a family.

Fortunately, a Serenity doesn't have a Capisen 38 engine.

I think your "things can suck, but still be okay" idea can be part of happiness. In the very least, it's a well-adjusted outlook on the realities of life; that everything, even discomfort, hard times, and grief really are fleeting.

However, I don't think by itself your concept is happiness. I think happiness comes from a security and confidence with the self, followed by a security and confidence in how the self fits in the situation at hand and the broader picture. When you get something you want, your favourite meal, a job you wanted, even romantic reciprocation of affection or what have you, even just surviving to the end of the day with enough coin in your pocket to keep going, that's really a validation of the worth of the self.

Other sources of happiness, such as being happy for someone else, have a more obscure source. I assume that to be happy for someone else, first they have to have something that they themselves are happy about, which you also see as a good, happy thing. For them, this ties into the validation thing I mentioned above. Second, you have to know the happy party well enough to know their struggles to really appreciate their triumphs.

Perhaps we see ourselves in others, which allows us to rejoice in their successes by proxy, which then the positivity we feel rewards us for caring about them and interacting with them.

AURAPTOR

Thursday, September 30, 2010 12:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by beatupplenty:

If true happiness can simply be the absence of conflict that would explain why many of us don't recognize the happiness when we have it.

How's that any different than saying peace is the absence of conflict?

Some conflict is good. Some struggles are healthy. Having NO conflict, means you're completely submissive, or dead.

"The modern definition of 'racist' is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal."

CHRISISALL

Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by beatupplenty:
It can get really hard to see to the happy ones, they can be so sporadic and fleeting if you see one embrace it so you can carry it with you later on.

^^^^That.

The laughing Chrisisall

JONGSSTRAW

Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:51 PM

I'm generally a happy person because it doesn't take much for me to feel good about life. Any number of stupid little things can make me happy, and as I get older those are the moments I set aside for myself. Then there are the cherished family moments that no amount of money can replace. When you see your children grow into interesting, productive, and caring people, the pride you feel is the happiest feeling on Earth.

CHRISISALL

Thursday, September 30, 2010 8:14 PM

^^^^ That too.

The laughing Chrisisall

OUT2THEBLACK

Sunday, October 3, 2010 1:13 AM

A History Of Happiness

By Darrin M. McMahon, Ph.D.

02 October, 2010
YES! Magazine

We've forgotten much of what older traditions knew about happiness

I think it is probably fair to assume that most Americans today consider happiness not only something that would be nice to have, but something that we really ought to have—and, moreover, something that’s within our power to bring about, if only we set our minds to it. We can be happy, we tell ourselves, teeth gritted. We should be happy. We will be happy.

That is a modern article of faith. But it is also a relatively recent idea in the West which dates from the 17th and 18th centuries, a time that ushered in a dramatic shift in what human beings could legitimately hope to expect in and from their lives. People prior to the late 17th century thought happiness was a matter of luck or virtue or divine favor. Today we think of happiness as a right and a skill that can be developed. This has been liberating, in some respects, because it asks us to strive to improve our lots in life, individually and collectively. But there have been downsides as well. It seems that when we want to be happy all of the time, we can forget that the pursuit of happiness can entail struggle, sacrifice, even pain.

Roots of happiness

Language reveals ancient definitions of happiness. It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happiness and chance.

What does this linguistic pattern suggest? For a good many ancient peoples—and for many others long after that—happiness was not something you could control. It was in the hands of the gods, dictated by Fate or Fortune, controlled by the stars, not something that you or I could really count upon or make for ourselves. Happiness, literally, was what happened to us, and that was ultimately out of our hands. As the monk in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales declares:

And thus does Fortune’s wheel turn treacherously And out of happiness bring men to sorrow.

In other words, the wheel of fortune controls our happenstance, and hence our happiness.

There were, of course, other ways of thinking about happiness. Those who have studied Greek or Roman philosophy will know that happiness—what the Greeks called, in one of several words, eudaimonia—was the goal of all Classical philosophy, beginning with Socrates and Plato, then taken up even more centrally by Aristotle, then featured prominently in all the major “schools” of Classical thought, including that of the Epicureans, Stoics, and so forth. In their view, happiness could be earned, a perspective that anticipates our modern one.

But there is a crucial difference between their ideas of happiness and ours. For most of these Classical philosophers, happiness is never simply a function of good feeling—of what puts a smile on our face—but rather of living good lives, lives that will almost certainly include a good deal of pain. The most dramatic illustration of this is the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero’s claim that the happy man will be happy even on the torture wrack.

That sounds ludicrous to us today—and perhaps it is—but it very nicely captures the way the ancients thought of happiness, not as an emotional state but as an outcome of moral comportment. “Happiness is a life lived according to virtue,” Aristotle famously says. It is measured in lifetimes, not moments. And it has far more to do with how we order ourselves and our lives as a whole than anything that might happen individually to any one of us.

Given these presuppositions, the ancients tended to agree that very few would ever succeed in being happy, because happiness takes an incredible amount of work, discipline, and devotion, and most people, in the end, a