Happiness & Drugs

Human beings are a species that has survived to this age due to certain of our behaviors being “rewarded” while others “reprimanded.” Many things we do on a day-to-day basis give us “pleasure” so that our brains are wired to repeat these actions over and over again. Eating, sleeping, and bathing are basic behaviors that promote our overall health and wellness. But what about social behaviors? 

As always, technological progress has occurred without much awareness or heed to the “human” consequences. Those are things we will have to learn to adapt to or make laws for as we learn from our mistakes. As media and, increasingly, AI have replaced social interactions and trust-building between individuals, that “pleasure” we receive from social interaction is even minimized. 

We can derive a social thumbs up from our evolutionary hardwiring through reading, listening to music, or scrolling social media. AI capabilities will no doubt open the gates to even more possibilities as people seek out AI personal assistants or even life partners. 

Love is a powerful “drug,” so to speak, as recorded in many songs and works of art. Chemically speaking, the release of “oxytocin” during moments of intimacy serves to powerfully connect individuals, whether that be between a parent and child, or between spouses. 

But what’s the bottom line, and what happens when we are forced to part ways with one of the things we have relied on to give us pleasure? Death will someday sever all relationship ties, and that’s including our own death, which perhaps not too many of us stop to think of, unless there is a particular reason to. 

There are so many pleasures and distractions we can fill our lives with in this modern, technologically-supercharged world that it is rare to even feel what it’s like to just have… nothing. (In fact, many of us are so scared of it that we will do anything and everything in our power not to feel that way by filling our time with people and activities we might not even really enjoy.)

But that’s what I think happiness is: how happy we are without “drugs.” Do we need to have something, do something, or be with someone in order to achieve happiness? Is not just our plain old existing in this wild and brilliant universe not good enough?

It is a good exercise to try to feel “nothing” as often as possible, through the practice of meditation. Can you be truly “happy” with just your in-breath and out-breath, doing nothing but sitting perfectly still, enjoying the moments as they lumber past like giants?

If we can be fully satisfied with that type of feeling, only then, I think, can we truly appreciate the wonders of life as it unfolds.