Happiness concepts and applications

Happiness

Follow your Bliss," this simple epithet espoused by the mythologist Joseph Campbell is at the heart of any inquiry on happiness. Can a human being do anything else? or, as outside observers such as psychologists realize, do we seek things that make us unhappy? And why would we? Both Pavlov and Skinner would agree that behavior is motivated by some kind of reward or payoff, whether emotional such as love and affection, or physical such as food and shelter. Both operant and classical conditioning have at their heart a reward or payoff regarding learned or instinctual behavior. Is it the reward that makes one happy, or the pursuit of the reward and achievement of the goal, or both.

In regards to the classical response-reward approach, once all the conditions for life are met, what should be left is happiness. This may be true for dogs and pigeons, but it somehow is not so clear-cut in human beings. Nature seems to give us an instinct for survival and certain pleasures in achieving the stages necessary for survival and procreation. There is surely pleasure in eating, in a good shelter with an excellent video and sound system, and a great deal of endorphins released during the procreative act. Nature tells us the biologically we are seeking that endorphin rush from these particular acts, and others. But happiness is more than pleasure, is it not? Perhaps what we call happiness is a learned behavior; a nurturing condition brought about by cultural and observational learning from the social orders. You will be happy if you get the right job, the right mate, the right house and car. It is possible that we follow these guidelines but as individuals we often discover that these can be things that do not really make us happy, in fact they may eventually have the opposite effect.