“And they lived happily ever after.” When we were children, we were read all kinds of fairy tales that ended with this enchanting phrase. We were promised eternal happiness. Deep inside, therefore, each of us carries some expectation that one day we too will experience it. In reality, however, life disappoints us again and again. This raises the question: Why did humanity develop this myth of happiness? Where does it come from, and what purpose does it serve? And more fundamentally, what is happiness? In an age when depression is becoming a kind of epidemic, we need a clear definition.
By nature, a person wants to receive pleasure and enjoyment, to enjoy life. This is the source of our aspiration for happiness. In every generation, people pursue whatever appears to them as happiness. Once, catching a mammoth made a person happy because they needed food for their family and relatives. Later, we developed and began wanting other things: freedom, relationships, career, wealth, success, status, education. Our desires continued to develop, and accordingly, our definition of happiness changed. Today we live in an age of abundance, yet people seem less happy. Why?
The feeling of happiness, the sense of fulfillment we receive from something, depends on the intensity of our desire for it. The greater our hunger for something, the more intensely we enjoy attaining it. If I lack nothing, I cannot enjoy anything. This is why loss of appetite or sexual desire is regarded as a problem and treated medically. There is another important point: once I attain something I wanted and experience pleasure from it, that pleasure gradually fades with time. The happiness that thing gave me disappears, evaporates, as though it had never existed.
The whole world is laid out in the palm of our hand: come and take, come and enjoy. Yet there is a certain sense of weariness in the air. Despair. And this despair does not come from being unable to attain something we desperately want, because today almost anything can be obtained, for instance, today we are even being sold tickets to space. Instead, it comes from a person having no desire for anything. This is what leads to depression. All over the world, young people sit around bored, not wanting to do anything. “Maybe you could do this,” worried parents suggest from time to time, “or perhaps that.” But they find no point in anything. “I don’t have the energy.” “What will it give me anyway?” the young people reply. They see no sources of happiness to absorb from. Such is the great problem of our time, not how to attain what we want and enjoy it, but how to develop a desire for something.
From a broader perspective, this is the central problem that will confront us as a human species. It will not simply disappear but will continue to grow. Humanity will become increasingly desperate, yet will not know how to define what must be done in order to attain happiness. As a result, this concept of aspiring to happiness will become something very distant and unrealistic. After we reach complete despair, a new stage in our development awaits us. Deep within the human heart, a piercing question will emerge: “What is the meaning of our lives?” “What are we living for?”
These eternal questions, which were once the concern of only a few individuals, will become the gateway for all of us into a new life. The great crisis of happiness will turn out to be a turning point, a point of birth into a new reality unlike anything we have known before. We will discover that nature, which always pushed us forward by awakening new desires, new aspirations, and new goals within us, has seemingly left us on our own only so that we will begin to examine for ourselves: What do we want to become?
Wonderful discoveries await us. We will learn that a happy person is someone who has a “developing deficiency.” A deficiency means a new kind of “lack,” one that continually grows stronger. A person feels a desire, a hunger, a yearning, an expectation that constantly intensifies. Whatever they attain does not extinguish their pleasure or diminish their feeling of happiness.
A happy person is one who has a constant and growing “deficiency,” together with a constant ability to fulfill it. These two opposites of “deficiency and fulfillment” exist within them simultaneously and continuously. They experience complete, perfect, eternal fulfillment that never ceases, accompanied by the confidence that it will never end, with flavors that continually intensify and desires that increasingly develop, while their enjoyment continues to grow. Fulfillment creates a new deficiency, and the deficiency leads to new fulfillment, and the two advance together.
Based on “New Life 220 – What Is Happiness?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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