Fulfillment

1. Satisfaction or happiness as a result of fully developing one's abilities or character.
2. The achievement of something desired, promised, or predicted: "winning the championship was the fulfillment of a childhood dream".

Fulfillment is generally thought to be the key to a happy life, or at least so the people who read this blog will believe.   I have read a number of advice books about happiness and they all emphasize the importance of setting goals, doing what you love, avoiding regret.  It seems clear to me that the vast majority of the people I have met believe that they must have some goal, some task, some effort to improve themselves or others.  Without it their life is "pointless" or "feckless", "hedonistic".  Any pleasures are "fleeting", without "meaning".  People ask themselves "where is this relationship going?" or "have I done everything that I want to do in my life?"  "Life is short" and "I don't want to waste my time."

If you look at how the people we know live their lives, most of them right now, and probably all the time you have known them, are devoting a substantial amount of their time, effort and money towards some achievement in the future.  It is assumed that the achievement of these goals will make them happy, will improve their lives.

This is taken for granted, a fact about human nature.  However, this is taken as a fact only by western cultures, and only relatively recently.  Throughout most of history in most of the world happiness has been equated largely with satisfaction with one's position.  The religions of Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism are about understanding and accepting how things are right now.  The idea is that once you have fully achieved this you experience bliss, living entirely in the now without ego or desire.  The largest state for most of recorded history, China, spent vast periods of time bent on ensuring the least amount of change possible.  The people of Europe were told for more than a thousand years to serve God and their Lord, and thank them for their mercy.

It is only with the advent of substantial numbers of people wealthy enough, and with adequate education, to need to fill their time that this concept of working towards some goal in order to be happy has emerged.  A peasant farmer doesn't think in terms of a long-term plan, perhaps a couple of years, in order to better himself so that he can feel good about himself.  A peasant farmer works his arse off to provide for himself and his family and takes what pleasure he can in the company of friends and family, and in the land that surrounds him.  it is only the otherwise idle rich who feel the need to fill their time, to justify themselves through some endeavor.

My point here is not to dismiss dreams, goals, plans, self-improvement etc. or to deny that having achieved a goal there is not great pleasure involved.  Every achievement in history required a concerted effort to achieve something.  My point is that the concept that such things are required for happiness is a cultural concept, a human invention, and a relatively recent one at that.  In other words, if you think that you can't be happy without some effort to get somewhere, and then getting there, you only believe that because you have been taught that.  It is not inherent in people, and some people think it to be highly detrimental to your happiness to believe it.

You don't have to better yourself to be happy.  You don't have to try, or work hard, or learn something to be happy.  If you didn't do anything today you have not necessarily wasted your time. 

On the other hand what is the happiness that you get from the achievement of a goal?  I have taught myself a number of sports, I have a degree, I have learned instruments and played them successfully in front of people.  I have traveled to different places, operated in different languages, driven through mountains, climbed mountains.  I have saved lives.  All of these have made me feel good, even elated, satisfied with my effort and skills.  All of the happiness was gone in a week or less.  The happiness was in that moment, doing the thing that I had learned, rather than in having done it.

We tell ourselves that we need to achieve goals to be happy.  We feel badly if we don't have goals, or we skip a bit off the path, or we delay the achievement.  We feel guilty at wasting these precious lives.  We don't have to do so if we don't want to.  Sometimes we are taught things that we don't even know we have been taught, and those things aren't always true.  Happiness is doing what you want when you want to, even if that thing is nothing at all.

There is nothing new in this from me, so why am I writing it?  What is the point?  Did you see that?

Still, I am writing this because I was told today in a lecture that we need to be reminded of true things.  It isn't enough to learn useful things, we must keep those useful things in our minds to use them.  I am reminding myself of this, firstly because I wish to do so, secondly because one of my goals is to keep thinking and saying what I think, and finally because I am getting bored with playing music by and to myself, and learning Spanish is becoming more of a chore.