The Illusion of Control

Is happiness, or the good old basic American right to pursue it, one of the eternal verities? The notion that happiness can be pursued, caught, and kept assumes one has a measure of control over one’s own life and feelings that may not exist. One of the mantras of the $160-an-hour listeners, the psychologists/psychiatrists, is: “We are responsible for our own feelings. We choose our own feelings. We control our own happiness.”

Do the paid listeners believe this mantra to be truth or do they merely pronounce it true as part of a treatment protocol? Certainly, change is less likely if the patient, sitting on the cushy couch, writing checks for the opportunity to fill listening ears, is unhappy, wants to be happy, and believes he is incapable of making himself happy. So paid listeners chant the mantra, and the check-writers receive what?--hope, perhaps even actual empowerment.

Faith listeners suggest it is self-deception to think one has that kind of control. While the context of their mantra is metaphysical/philosophical, perhaps it is more likely to be true. It carries more authority because it is untainted by self-interest. One is not required to pay them to hear their mantra: “You can control only whether you do evil or good.” The choice to do evil or good in even the smallest actions has infinite, eternal, and universal consequences, but at the personal level only a few potential emotional consequences: happiness, sadness, an emotional flatness that is neither. Possibly personal happiness ceases to be a preoccupation when one concentrates on doing the right thing. A focus on the choice between the über-values of good and evil may push the obsession for personal happiness into a more appropriate perspective.

Doing good without concern for personal happiness is one of the eternal verities. Though the phrase “doing good” seems so non-specific and subject to personal interpretation as to appear meaningless, if one assumes the possibility that “good” may exist, that it is a worthy thing, and that it may actually be done, then a view of how unselfishness raises even the least “doing good” to the level of the eternal verities becomes clearer. The taint that drags any action out of the eternal and into the finite is self-interest, selfishness. Happiness, joy, and the abundant life are not evil, but grasping them may be. At their happiest, most joyful, and most abundant they are by-products of “doing good,” and cannot be the goal.

The same writings that codify and objectify the specifics of “doing good” assert the superiority of that choice over the pursuit of happiness even as they identify the joyful abundance inevitable in a selfless life. The way to lose happiness is to pursue, catch a hold of it, and try to keep it. To gain that which is greater than happiness, one must break off the pursuit, refocus on doing good and allow all ephemeral and empty seductions to slough away from life like the excreta they are.